soroban

I was introduced to the abacus as a child. My grandfather was fascinated by the abacus and tried to teach me, giving me a little abacus to play with. Unfortunately, living far away from him, I never got past the basics. My wife was doing soroban, Japanese abacus, in school as a child. She remembers it being fun and useful and regrets she didn’t become more proficient in using it – skilled soroban users don’t even need the actual abacus but can visualize it and do the calculations mentally.  

Practicing soroban is apart from learning arithmetic supposed to be very good brain training as well, and when my wife started to talk about our son learning soroban both my son and I got excited to try it out. I found a class close by that were open to kindergarten kids and since our son seemed to enjoy the trial lesson we enrolled. Now, a month and a half in, he and I have made a fun Friday routine. I pick up my son at his kindergarten, we go to the nearby park (if the weather is nice) for a snack and some play, then we continue to the nearby shopping mall and look at the toys (and visit Mr. Donut if it is raining). Before going to the soroban classroom we stop by the library and borrow some books (or a lot of books depending on the day, with focus on space and dinosaurs). Then I drop him off, do some grocery shopping, maybe a cup of coffee, and pick him up again. On our way home we always take the narrow countryside-like road, stopping at the big pond where the fish are coming to great us when they see our bicycle by the fence.

Our son gets a little bit of homework every week, and I am managing to follow along for now, happy to learn a little bit myself as well. But no doubt my son will soon have to explain to me what he is doing instead of me helping him. That is also very exciting. 

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