Toy Hunt (Toys with numbers)

This week’s toy hunt theme is toys with numbers. Joy said it’s a special day today, it’s her Bianca’s birthday! Happy birthday to your daughter Joy. If you love toys as much as we do, come join us here.

This is a toy that my sister gave to Kayil. She bought it in Divisoria, for 35 PhP. This is one of the cheapest toy in his collections. Cheapest not because it was less than a dollar, it was cheap because at that value my son can learn a lot from that toy. He can do addition and subtraction using this.

It has 13 columns with two beads on top representing heaven(upper deck) and 5 beads down representing Earth (lower deck). The decks are separated by a horizontal beam. The use of abacus is rather complicated to my simple neurons, I have to dig and dig and read more in order to learn how to use it. Here is a site that best describe how it is used, go on and play with it, it’s fun. Well it seems that it was not really that hard. From what I remember, using it is as easy as dumplings (yum!eating dumplings,, shrimp preferably). Each upper deck beads are valued as 5, and the lower decks are valued as 1. If you are to count 6, all you need is to move the beads towards the beam, 1 from the upper deck, then 1 from the lower deck. Each column is valued as tens, hundreds, thousands and so on (starting from right). If you need to count 105, the placement of beads are as followed: 1st column: 1 bead from the upper deck 2nd column: no beads (since there is no tens value) 3rd column: 1 bead from the lower deck A 6789 value is represented as: 1st column: 1 bead from the upper deck, 4 beads from the lower deck 2nd column: 1 bead from the upper deck, 3 beads from the lower deck 3rd column: 1 bead from the upper deck, 2 beads from the lower deck 4th column: 1 bead from the upper deck, 1 beads from the lower deck I never experienced using an abacus so forgive me for my elaborate entry.. Have you tried adding or subtracting using an abacus?