Soroban (Abacus) School

 Mrs. Hara met me near the Soroban School that SET-J had researched for me.  This is an afterschool enrichment school.  What struck me first off was the mix of ages and how little some of the students were. 

I found out later that the youngest student is 3 years old and that many of the students there that day were 5 and 6.  The oldest was 10 years old.  Students stay from one to three hours at Soroban school and come multiple days a week.  They also came in with homework that they had done at home afterwards.

During the school time, each student has their own workbook and knows just what he or she is working on.  They do a mix of timed tests and untimed work. 

 

They correct their own answers and move on to the next assignment.  They work on addition and subtraction, multiplication and division, and even square roots.  All of these have varying lengths of numbers and a mix of decimals and whole numbers.  With each new “level” of complexity, students move through using the beads on the abacus, to imagining the abacus in their minds and moving their fingers, to moving their eyes as they imagine the abacus, to doing the full solution in their mind.  In addition to problems given on paper, students also work on a computer to practice different speeds and complexity of numbers to add or subtract.  The teacher told me that the world record is to add 15 3-digit numbers in 1.6 seconds.  He showed me what that looked like on the computer and I found I could not even keep track of what number I was seeing at that speed, without even trying to add them.  Wow!

The soroban (or abacus) uses 4 ones and one 5 in each place value column to represent any number.  The length of the number depends on how many columns you have on your particular abacus.  The beads that are pushed toward the bar are counted and the others are not.  The tool would fit right in with the ten frames and rekenreks that students learn to use at Lawrence. 

When you add on the abacus, you move more beads in each column in order to combine what you had with the new number.  This often requires regrouping (or changes in more than one column at a time).  For example if adding 8 to 14 one might add 1 ten then take away 2 ones because 10-2 is the same as 8. 

The teacher also showed me how you can use the abacus to keep track of multiplication and division.  Both require that students have memorized their multiplication facts up to 9 x 9.  It will take me a lot of practice to understand better and be able to calculate with the abacus.

The teacher is so proud of his work and his school that he gave me a copy of the book of number sequences that he published.  As he says, everything is in there.  To hear him read the series of numbers for his students to calculate sounds like religious chanting.  And the students have the answer before he even finishes chanting the last number.  It is a wonder to watch!