Chasing Cheerios

Saturday, September 12, 2009

Using an Abacus


I recently bought this abacus from IKEA, and O has really enjoyed counting with it. I was surprised by how her interest in counting and numbers has really spiked since adding the abacus to our shelf. I'm looking forward to working with the abacus often in "school" this year!

13 comments:

  1. Since you have inspired our home so much, I wanted to share this with you. My older son (6) uses the RightStart Math program that is abacus based. My 3 year old of course wanted to have one and count with it. Recognizing quantities of 5 is a big part of the early lessons so on her abacus similar to O's, we put small colored stickers on the first 5, then a different color on the next 5. She has quickly picked up on 7 being "5 and 2" and I credit the stickers for helping her with that understanding. O's abacus is really cool!!

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  2. Oh, great idea and great idea Jo!!
    Adding this to my ever growing list of wonderful idea.

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  3. I often wondered if an abacus would be useful at all and now I know. thanks so much!

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  4. We have a small abacus. I have no idea what to do with it. So I hope you post some ideas for "the clueless readers":D

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  5. Like The Crazy Girl we haven't had much like with our abacus - how did you 'present' it to get such a great response?

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  6. Us too - we have one, but my daughter hasn't showed much interested beyond making the beads roll as wildly as she can!

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  7. it looks like there are already a few questions that you can answer regarding the abacus, so I'm sure you will respond to that in an upcoming post. ;-) Did the one from Ikea come with any type of explanation on how to use them? Thanks as always for your blogging!

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  8. We have the same abacus! I haven't had it available for awhile, you have reminded me that I should pull it out soon.

    I am also a Montessori homeschooling mom, I'd love to have you visit my blog at html://www.notahomeschooler.blogspot.com

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  9. We also have the IKEA abacus, I am surprised at how much my kids love and play with it. The options for make believe are endless!

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  10. The abacus didn't have come with any suggestions for use. Also, I didn't present it in any special way. I just made it available, and she immediately started counting on it. She suddenly seemed interested in counting after I made the abacus available with no effort on my part :) So far, all we've done is count on it. I'm planning on just searching on google for more ideas for using it. Sorry that I don't have any more suggestions, but I'll post about what we do with it eventually...

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  11. I wonder if some children are just naturally more attracted to some materials than others ... Munchkin does enjoy seeing how fast she can flick the beads from one side to the other ;)

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  12. Here's a link to a blog that offers some activities using the abacus. Different ways to encourage play and learning at the same time:

    http://planningnotebook.blogspot.com/2008/03/abacus-activities.html

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