Sum-Thing Everyone Can Use
Written: Sep 30 '05 (Updated Oct 03 '05)
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Pros: Nicely constructed, conveniently symmetric color arrangement, wonderful educational tool.
Cons: Slide 'em all to the left: there are ZERO cons.
The Bottom Line: Every kid three and up needs one. And parents will find it surprisingly handy as well.
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| theeye's Full Review: Melissa and Doug - Wooden Abacus |
Every child ought to have a children's abacus by the age of three or so.
If you like, you can stop reading now. That categorical recommendation pretty much, um, sums it up. But if you need more convincing, allow me to marshal the evidence for you.
My five-year-old son, who is the proximate cause of my recent series of game reviews, is, in his words, 'very good at number math'. While he still has a lot of rote memorization ahead of him, he's got a very solid understanding of addition and subtraction and a good head start at multiplication as well. And he only started kindergarten a few weeks ago.
(Even newcomers will have figured out by now that the price of reading my reviews is tolerating a bit of proud-mommy talk.)
How, you might ask, has he developed such a strong facility with numbers? There are a lot of elements to developing early numeracy, but one of the most important factors is the introduction of tools that help make numbers tangible and concrete concepts. And of those tools, none is more fundamental than the classic children's abacus.
It's all Chinese to me
A child's abacus is not to be confused with the more complex Chinese Suan-pan, Japanese Soroban or the various European abaci. These more advanced tools can be used for a variety of arithmetic operations including even the extraction of square roots. (See footnote for further information on standard abaci, their history and use.) Older children may well benefit from learning the use of a real abacus, but the device I am reviewing today is far more elementary and well-suited to the preschool set.
The children's abacus from Melissa & Doug is a nicely turned out wooden device (it hardly seems fair to call it a toy). The blond wood frame has gently rounded corners, a well-balanced base and sturdy construction; the ten metal bars each hold ten brightly colored wooden beads which slide effortlessly back and forth. The chunky beads are easy for little fingers to manipulate and the width allows for easy segregation of groups of beads, which helps children count out the required number.
Okay, quick now: with one hundred beads, and using a decimal representation of numbers, how high do you think you can count? While you're figuring out the answer, let's review how a child's abacus works.
To display a number, we begin with the top row of beads, which serves as the ones place in a decimal representation of an integer. For numbers from one through nine, just slide the appropriate number of beads over to the right side of the bar. (In fact, you can choose which direction to use: just be sure to be consistent.)
It's just a jump to the left / And a step to the right
If we want to display ten, we can push the tenth bead over. But here's where it gets fun. As soon as the tenth bead moves over to the right, it's time to slide the whole row back to the left and slide a single bead from the next row over to the right: the second row represents the tens place and each individual bead on that row counts as ten.
Now, with all of the ones beads back to the left, we're free to begin sliding them back to the right again to display eleven, twelve and so on. Adding is easy as pie: we just slide over additional beads, doing our little Time Warp move each time we find that all the beads on a given bar have ended up over to the right: just slide them all back and give yourself another bead on the next row. Used up all your tens beads? No problem, slide them back and give yourself one hundred on the third bar down.
Subtraction is a little more advanced, but with a little practice your preschooler will develop enough facility with the abacus and, more importantly, with the number concepts being represented, to subtract arbitrary values using this tool.
Now I know what you're thinking.
My child isn't going to be interested in sitting and doing math problems on an abacus. It's boring and tedious and not fun at all.
Folks, you're looking at this all wrong.
Let's do the Time Warp again
An abacus is a tool. Tools are helpful when you use them for the right job. And what, you ask, is the right job for a children's abacus?
The right job for a children's abacus is keeping score. If your child is anything like mine, he or she loves playing games. Card games, board games, all sorts of games. And once you graduate from Candyland and Chutes and Ladders, you start to find that a lot of games require keeping score.
You could just jot down the scores on a piece of paper or on the score cards that a lot of games provide. And then you could add up all the numbers yourself because it's faster that way.
Or you can pull out the abacus, stand it up next to your game setup and have your child move the beads each turn. There's no better incentive for learning to read the numbers off an abacus than being able to tell whether I'm beating you, Mommy! You're soooo going to lose this game!
The Melissa & Doug abacus is very well-suited to scoring two-player games. The bead colors repeat half way down, so that each player can have a scoring area consisting of blue, red, white, green and yellow rows. With five rows per player, scores as high as a hundred thousand, or even a bit more, can be represented. That's more than enough to score any kids' game I'm familiar with. (Those of you still trying to figure out how high a number this abacus can represent will note the clue they've just been handed.)
If you've got three players, you'll have to be more alert to keep track of three different scores, but it can certainly be done. Assuming you don't expect scores above one hundred, I recommend assigning the top two rows (blue and red) to the first player and then two pairs of green and yellow to the other two players. This leaves blank rows between each player and the matching colors make it easier to remember where you're scoring.
My husband and I have even taken to using this abacus to score games when we play without our son. As observers of the Jewish Sabbath, we don't use writing implements on Saturdays, which can make it difficult to keep score when playing games like Scrabble. In the old days, we'd each take a big fat paperback book and a playing card and use the card to bookmark the page corresponding to our score. Using the abacus is much simpler and allows each of us to determine the current score at a glance. It's so convenient that we've taken to pulling out the abacus even during the week: score cards have become a thing of the past in our household.
Time's up. Pencils down, please.
So how big a number can be scored on this abacus? The answer is . . . a whopping 11,111,111,110. That's eleven billion, one hundred and eleven million, one hundred and eleven thousand, one hundred and ten.
Or, for you Brits: eleven thousand one hundred and eleven million, one hundred and eleven thousand, one hundred and ten.
Either way, one heck of a big number and likely more than you'll ever need.
Fortunately, you'll only need the top bar of wooden beads to count out the price of this abacus which can be had for under ten bucks. And that's a bargain you shouldn't pass up.
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Additional information and resources:
Overall physical dimensions: 12 inches square and 3 inches deep.
The art, science and history of the standard abacus: http://www.ee.ryerson.ca:8080/~elf/abacus/index.html
Learn to use a Chinese abacus with an animated demonstration: http://www.mandarintools.com/abacus.html
Games my son (and his folks) recommend for the grammar school gamester (some of which require scoring): Four Children's Card Games, King's Table, The Game of Chips, Fluxx, Kill Dr. Lucky, Aquarius, DuelMasters, Monopoly, Roadside Rescue, Rush Hour, Jr.
Many thanks to MaryTara for getting this product listed for me.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 10
Type of Toy: Educational
Age Range of Child: Whole Family
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Epinions.com ID:
theeye
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Location: New York, NY (it's a hell of a town!)
Reviews written: 66
Trusted by: 165 members
About Me:
Company president, math geek, first time mom at 39, epinion addict. Sleep? Not lately.
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