Has anyone taught their kid how to use an abacus?

[Mimm]

I mean a real one with the five beads on each row? https://www.amazon.com/Yellow-Mountain-Imports-Vintage-Wooden/dp/B00SQW8EYS/ref=sr_1_5?s=toys-and-games&ie=UTF8&qid=1544541784&sr=1-5&keywords=abacus

Did you feel it helped them with mental math? At what age did you start? And if you yourself had no experience with it, can you point me toward a series of videos that might help? 🙂

I have a five year old and she's getting interested in sit down learning and I thought this might be a fun hands on way of learning some math that might help her in the long term. I read some people online saying that people who learn the abacus are crazy fast at mental math later one and it creates muscle memory and they tend to fiddle with their fingers while calculating long numbers quickly in their head. I'm wondering if this is true, if it might be helpful even if that's not strictly true. Or is the time investment simply not worth the return? 🙂

Edited December 11, 2018 by Mimm

[school17777]

I have with the Rightstart Activities for Al Abacus.

[EKS]

I also used the AL Abacus with RightStart (and I highly recommend RS for young children).  I like it because it reinforces the concept of place value.  The abacus you linked does not do that as obviously.

[Jackie]

As a tool for learning number sense, I prefer the AL abacus to the Soroban style. My daughter did learn the AL abacus, and it was useful for our purposes.

[silver]

I used this a little bit with one of my kids:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.lookkidsw.KnowAbacus

I could see it helping with mental math if you stick with it. The most of what he got out of it was to figure out how to count to 99 on his fingers (the thumbs are the "heaven" beads that represent 5, the fingers on the right hand are ones, the fingers on the left hand are tens). 

[Skippy]

We used the AL Abacus with RightStart. It was very useful for one child who loved it and used it all the time. The other two children didn't use it much. So I think maybe it depends on the child.

[73349]

We used a soroban a bit, but my child preferred Cuisenaire rods and unit blocks.

[Slache]

The Al Abacus did wonders for my children's mental math so I don't see why this wouldn't.

Mine were about 5. I had no experience but it was so self explanatory that we were able to jump right in.

[Arcadia]

Soroban from Daiso as my kids like to dismantle things. So buying a soroban from my local Asian store that cost more than $10 would be costly for my kids to dismantle.

Instructions from here https://mduchin.math.tufts.edu/UMich/385/soroban.pdf

No idea about mental math as my kids were already decent in mental math before playing with the soroban. I knew how to use the chinese version but not the Japanese one.

[SoCal_Bear]

If you are looking for a real abacus, I have this one which has a nifty reset button which is totally worth the extra $10.
https://www.amazon.com/Yellow-Mountain-Imports-Vintage-Wooden/dp/B00SQW8EYS/ref=sr_1_5?s=toys-and-games&ie=UTF8&qid=1544600397&sr=1-5&keywords=abacus

This series is easy to use. It's incremental and step by step with illustrations as to what your hand should be doing. I only linked the level 1 instruction book. There are two workbooks that go along with level 1. SAI Academy publishs 3 levels.

https://www.amazon.com/Abacus-Mind-Math-Instruction-Level/dp/1941589006/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1544600485&sr=1-3&keywords=abacus

 

[geodob]

Here's a link to a 7 row Soroban, which is better to start with.

https://au.grandado.com/products/plastic-abacus-arithmetic-soroban-7-digits-kids-maths-calculating-tools-chinese-abacus-toys-abacus-educational-small-size-12x6cm?variant=13592609390649