Trying something else with Maths

As I previously stated, we use and love the Singapore maths curriculum. Unfortunately my daughter N has struggled with it somewhat. Now when I say struggled, that is a bit of a stretch. If N was in school it would be completely acceptable as she understand and completes all the work correctly. The problem is her memorisation of maths facts. With the Singapore curriculum, a lot of emphasis is put on memorising basic maths facts and getting an absolutely firm foundation in the basic building blocks of maths. A lot of which they skim over in the regular British curriculum and find that is is just enough for the child to understand, and to be able to work with. With the Singapore the children MUST MEMORISE and well as understand. The first few years are vital to making the child's later maths studies easier and building upon.

I must reiterate that if you put the sums in front of my daughter she could work it out usingt he methods taught to her, but her mental arithamtics is not as well as I had hoped it would be. But the great thing about home eductaion is that you can adapt things to suit yoru child, you can change thinsg up a bit to bring out the best in your child. which is of course what we really want. We want our children to be the best bversions of themselves they can be.

This is where the Japanese abacus comes in, also called a soroban. It is a wonderful tool used for centuries to calculate both small and large mathematical equations. Studies have also shown that learning to use an abacus greatly improves ones ability to do mental arithmatics of LARE sums. the kind you and I (in the 'west') would use a calculation for. Just what I need!

So I have just watched a few videos on using an abacus, ordered my first abacus/soroban off of Amazon and am excited to start (ordered it Monday and it came Tuesday. Woohoo!). As for me, I will update with how she is getting on once we get into the motion of it all. Excited :)

There is also the Chinese abacus aka the suanpan if you would like an alternative but for us, I think we will stick to the soroban-for now.

How about you, Have you or your children use the soroban? How do you find it?