Soroban (Japanese abacus) training for third grader?

Post date: 2018-09-20 07:16:14

If you are familiar with soroban training for kids - popular in the southeast Asian community - or if you are an elementary teacher, can you please tell me if you think it's worthwhile as a method to teach a child who is struggling a bit with simple adding and subtracting (what her third grade teacher calls the math facts?

I let a friend convince to enroll my daughter in one of those mental math classes that uses the abacus teaching method, which I am completely unfamiliar with. Yesterday my husband and I watched some you tube videos to figure out how addition and subtraction were done. I thought it would be pretty easy, but we were both utterly confused and now I feel awful for making her do this. It seems just way more complicated than other math learning methods. But, perhaps I just think that because the abacus us so foreign to me as an Anglo-Saxon westerner? Any thoughts in whether we should continue with it? She hates it, but of course she does - it's doing math outside of school! And she doesn't get it, but then she's only been to two classes.

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