It Must Have Been Quite A Party -- May 30, 2020

When I work up this morning, and walked to the kitchen to get a cup of coffee, this is what I saw on the dining room table (which also functions as as the breakfast table, crafts table, Polly Pocket's changing room, Corky's bakery, and  Sophia's LEGO assembly area). It must have been quite a party last night. LOL.

On another note, but speaking of Sophia, we have been working on addition, using different techniques, including flashcards, of course, as well as hash marks and fingers. It appears "hash marks" is the preferred Montessori method.

I am now working with Sophia on "solving for x," which is a magnitude of difficulty greater than simple addition, which surprised me. It appears incredibly challenging which I did not expect. I write out formulas like "x + 3 = 10" and I ask her to tell me which number added to three will yield ten. It seems incredibly simple but she has great difficulty, even though she knows 3 + 7 = when doing addition exercises.

I thought about it all day yesterday trying to sort out why it is so difficult for a five-year-old to comprehend what we are trying to do. Obviously it's subtraction but even trial and error should result in the correct answer fairly quickly.

It dawned on me that Sophia "knows" her numbers and she has a grasp for visualizing what three apples are or what seven pennies are but trying to bring all that abstraction and concreteness together just doesn't work when trying to "solve for x."

I don't know.

But thinking that might be the problem, what other tool do we have that could combine that abstract formula on paper ("x + 3 = 10") with something concrete? Yes, pennies work but I wanted to get away from the mundane. Something different.

Voila.

The abacus. She has a beautiful abacus and has been exposed to it at TutorTime-Montessori but has never really used it as a tool. I think in our culture -- certainly in our household -- the abacus is a "toy," and not a tool.

So, last night we -- Sophia and I -- used the abacus for the first time to "solve for x." Wow! It was incredible. She immediately got the hang of it was doing advanced calculus in no time. Just joking. But in no time she was solving for x and very, very proud of her ability to do that.

The spin-off is this: now that "we" see the abacus as a tool (and not a toy), we will continue to explore how we can use the abacus to do other things.