The abacus is a good example of how ideas travel from one culture to another. Just look at its name, which means sand, probably because drawing with a finger on a sandy surface was one of the earliest ways of counting:

Hebrew: avak = dust
Phoenician: abak = sand
Greek: abax or abakon = table or tablet (covered with sand or dust)
Latin: abakos = abacus
Middle English (around 1300 A.D.) abacus = abacus

The oldest known counting board was made by the Babylonians in 300 B.C. In Ancient Rome, merchants and officials counted each calculus, or pebble, on their pocket-sized grooved boards. The familiar Chinese abacus, or suan pan, only dates back to 1200 A.D, and the streamlined Japanese version, the soroban, now used in many Asian communities, wasn’t developed until 1930. How did the idea behind the abacus spread to so many parts of the world?

In the Abacus Program, students will get to try out models of sand tables and pebble boards, look at maps and timelines to see how information could pass slowly throughout Europe and Asia by means of military conquest and trade along the Silk Road, and make their own sturdy abacus from popsicle sticks and pony beads. While their creations are drying, they’ll learn the different parts of the abacus, how to read numbers on it, and how to do addition. By the end of the program they will be able to add five-digit numbers in seconds!

Along with handouts containing information, instructions, and an abacus worksheet, students can listen to or look at nonfiction and storybooks about the abacus and different methods of counting around the world. If Internet access is available, they can try a virtual abacus online and look at a gallery of fun handmade abaci created by the director of a soroban school in Singapore.

For directions to make a mini-abacus based on this workshop, click here!

To learn how to use the abacus, click here!

Copyright © 2008 Kathy Ceceri

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