Student Abacus with 9 Beads

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This specially designed abacus provides 9 beads per rod to aid students learning standard arithmetic. Not only for students, it works well for beginners and anyone wanting an ultra-clean abacus design. The upper 5 beads are green and the lower 4 beads are white making it easy to determine the value of each rod without counting every bead.

Materials: Pine frame, plastic beads. The Student Abacus measures approximately 7.8" x 3.7" x .67" (200 x 95 x 17 mm).

Comes in clear plastic bag. No printed instructions. See instructions below.

Student Abacus Instructions

- Lay the student abacus on a flat surface with the white beads closest to you and the green beads above the white beads.

- Start by moving all the beads to the bottom to represent zero. Any bead touching the top bar represents a value.

- The rod farthest to the right represents the ones, and each rod to the left is a factor of 10 higher. The tens are on the second rod from the right and the hundreds are the third rod from the right, and so on. To get a decimal value, you can choose the decimal location between any two rods and just remember where it is.

Values

Let's try an example of the value 16.

- On the second rod from the right move one bead up to represent the 10.
- On the first rod from the right move six beads up. This will be five green beads and one white bead. Notice how it is easy to count 6 because when a white bead appears, it means there are already five green beads up, plus the one white bead to make six.

Addition

Let's add 12 to the number 16 already on the abacus.

- On the tens rod (2nd from right), move one bead up to add the 10.
- On the ones rod, move two beads up to add the remaining 2.

The result is 2 beads on the tens rod and 8 beads on the ones rod for a total of 28.

A cool trick: Lets add 4 to the existing number of 28. We don't have 4 beads left to move up, so we do two moves. Since 10 - 6 is also equal to 4, here are the moves.

1. Add 10 by moving 1 tens bead up.
2. Subtract 6 by moving 6 ones beads down.

The result is the same as adding 4, and the value is 32. This is a very common operation with the abacus. It is very similar to carrying one when adding on paper.

Subtraction

Subtracting numbers is just as easy as adding with an abacus. Let's subtract 3 from 15.

- Move all the beads down to get zero. Do this by tilting the abacus up and they all slide down. - Move 1 tens bead up and 5 ones beads up to get 15. - To subtract 3, just move 3 ones beads down to get 12.

Another cool trick: Let's subtract 3 from 12. Since we don't have 3 ones beads to move down, we do it in two steps. Since 7 - 10 is also -3, we do the following steps:

1. Move 1 tens bead down to subtract 10.
2. Move 7 ones beads up to add 7. The result is the same as subtracting 3 for a value of 9.

Multiplication

In multiplication, two numbers are multiplied like you would do on paper except that no writing needs to be done. The running result is placed on the abacus and each new multiplied term is added to the result on the abacus using standard addition. If there is room, you can place one or both numbers to multiply on the far left of the abacus to remember them. Then, one column of the multiplied number can be removed as that column is finished.

Division

Division is performed similar to multiplication with the abacus being used as a tool to record the intermediate results of the division operation. The specific instructions are too long to list here, but are available from several resources through a web search.

The case for an abacus

While modern calculators are useful and important educational instruments in the right setting, they also can be a crutch where children miss out on fundamental math manipulation skills. An abacus, however, provides a tool to arrive at the answer quickly, but still allows children to deeply learn the fundamental skills.

See our complete abacus selection.

Availability: In stock! Ships next business day when order is placed by 6pm PST. Please allow an additional 4-6 business days for UPS ground delivery. If you need faster delivery, please use expedited shipping options.

Qualifies for free ground shipping on orders over $75. See shipping details and restrictions. See transit time map.

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