Beads of heaven and earth

We enrolled Jakjak in a mental arithmetic class to complement his growing academic endeavors. He has been doing regular classes classified as K2 for more than half a year now. So far, he has improved his skills in reading, writing and math. He is still just five, so we don't really want to force him (too much). We do encourage him, and we do put his lessons in some of his 'play' time, but we do it in moderation. I remember when I was young and I was studying, and I remember just suddenly letting myself off. I think I got bored.


Nowadays, there are different methods of learning. Different schools, different subject matters, different media (heck, I learned a lot from YouTube tutorials). With all the choices available, and most of them being accessible, it was actually a chore to decide. We eventually went for mathematics, his dad is an engineer after all. Well, actually, it's because his dad needed a good nogging in math too.

The first lessons were actually quite easy to understand. Jakjak's abacus only came in beads of 9, easy peasy. That was the first few lessons, when adding and subtracting always equalled to anything between 0 to 9. It was when they started adding more than 9 that I was left scratching my head. You see, the abacus does not come with an LCD screen thay shows you exactly what the answer is. And it does not have any of the operational symbols either (you know, the plus and minus signs?). No wonder some other genius invented the calculator! Granted, he was probably a wee bit lazier than the guy who invented the abacus.


So now, I'm back on YouTube ... looking for abacus tutorials. (this is where I got the heaven and earth beads analogy - hah! see, I already learned something new!)