Feltballs Abacus Study - Abacus Three-Month Lesson Taught by A Six-Years-Old Teacher
Mayumi Ueno, Tokyo University of Technology (Japan)
Abstract
I visualize invisible numbers with felt balls and let small children experience arithmetic concepts by moving them for preschool and primary education. In Japan, it is said that 40% of university students do not understand the ratio ,but if you let small children experience the concept of arithmetic as a play house using felt balls, the subsequent understanding will be smooth for them. April 2020, I taught addition with felt balls to a 6-year-old girl who was late to start arithmetic study because of covid-19. And I taught her the concept of abacus with them, which allowed her to calculate from 1 to 999. She gladly accepted the abacus concept when she repeated the simulated shopping experience using homepages such as Sushiro and McDonald’s. After that, she created a club to teach abacus online to five six-year-olds who are completely unaware of abacus in the world. In this paper, I would like to report on the curriculum of abacus lesson over three months at the club run by her to help introduce abacus learning.