The Abax

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Make your own Cardboard Abax

Educators just love buzz words. One of the most frequently used buzzwords in math ed. is “manipulatives.” Of course, the greatest manipulatives there are, are your hands and fingers. (Ever wonder why they call them “digits?”)

In the last post, I talked about basic addition. The links lead to MathMojo pages where you could learn a better way to count and do simple addition on your fingers than the way you learned (or didn’t learn) in school. 

The next step in manipulatives is the Abax. An abax is the forerunner of the abacus. It was the ancient counting  board, that, in the West at least, was used deep into the 15th century, when we were still using Roman numerals. (Ever try to add or multiply with Roman numerals?)

Using the abax today, we use base 10 and Arabic numerals, so it is much easier. It’s even easier than using an abacus, because the abacus uses a modified base 10 system, using groups of fives as well. 

The use of an abax is about the most visual and tactile way you can teach basic counting and arithmetic. I’d never actually seen or heard of  one being used in a classroom, so I investigated. Now it turns out that the abax pages are the most visited pages on the entire MathMojo site. People have been writing for over a year for me to start selling them and the instruction booklets for them again.

I had stopped making abaxes because my router was on the fritz. I finally realized that was a lame excuse not to make such a great learning tool available, so I have created an online tutorial (pdf file) that you can download for free to make your own abax out of cardboard. It only takes a few minutes to make. You can watch a short video of how to do it here:

how_to_make_a_cardboard_abax.mov

You can also:
download the free pdf. instructions for how to make an abax here.

I’ve also made the booklet “Counting and Adding on an Abax” available for sale again. It is only $9.95 as a downloadable e-booklet (it’s also available as a physical booklet for shipping by mail) and is about the best first investment you could make in a child’s math education.

Order your own copy of “Counting and Adding on an Abax” here.

I’m also getting ready to send out the newest issue of “The MathMojo Monthly” (”Comes out Quarterly, Mostly”) newsletter. It’s been so long since I’ve published one, that this one is packed with math and information. If you haven’t signed up for it yet, you might like to head out to Mathmojo.com, where you can sign up for
it now.

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