All About Secret of Boosting Your Child's Brain Power: Nov 2020 New

The abacus can help to boost a child's brain power as training mental math (the ability to mentally solve math problems without the help of any tool like calculators or paper and pencil) uses many aspects of the body and brain.
 

I'm the author of this article and I'm a qualified abacus teacher, answering questions from around the world online abacus and various questions from online-soroban.com students.

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A child's ability to concentrate and do anything for long periods of time is something that needs to be worked on since it is unfair to expect students (especially young kids) to focus their attention on a single subject when it is something they might have not been taught and practiced.

Concentration is related to the children's academic stamina and with their brain power; while they have most likely not built the stamina to focus their attention and concentration yet, it is something that can be taught in the classroom, using different tools to develop the correct IQ level kids might have.
 

1-1.How Can I Boost My Child's Brain Power

Brain power is another term to refer to the intellectual ability that a person may have or, in easier words, the way someone’s brain organizes their ideas and thoughts, a skill required to be able to think critically and solve problems in challenge situations; this part of brain power can be divided in fluid intelligence (referring to the ability to solve new problems and the way they respond to situations) and crystal intelligence (relying on experience, developed skills and previously learned knowledge to solve a problem).

Since development is different for each kid, it is important for teachers and parents to understand the child’s intellectual stage so they can provide them different activities to support their child’s cognitive or intellectual growth.

A good way to boost brain power in school is through the use of multi-sensory learning tools, as it engages multiple areas of the brain at the moment of solving the activities.

Multi-sensory learning proposes that kids learn better if they’re taught using more than one sense, employing visual, kinesthetic, auditory, and tactical techniques; all brain’s functions are connected and for this reason, it makes sense for them to be trained all together.

1-2.Can I Use the Abacus to Boost My Child’s Brain Power?

An effective learning tool that helps boost knowledge is the abacus since it is a counting tool with the purpose to develop the ability to solve math operations mentally – in order to achieve this, kids need to have critical thinking, the key to having high brainpower and intellectual ability, which will allow them to have better results in the school area.

The abacus is itself a multi-sensory tool, which will allow the child to develop different areas of learning at the same time; the motor skills that the child needs to slide the beads when performing operations.

The abacus helps children to improve their learning since they tend to remember better the topics if the teaching is associated with objects that they could relate to or find interesting.

Since the abacus is an attractive tool (usually with the beads made of different colors to represent the units) kids will be interested in how it works, approaching math in a funnier environment. It helps to improve cognitive flexibility (the ability to transform and understand the given information); since with the abacus they work progressively, from the simple to the complex, the brain has time to process information and instructions, aware of the reasons and meaning behind them, allowing kids to slowly improve the capacity to issue an immediate response and offer different perspectives on the same problem, making them a creative and innovative person as well.

1-3. Understanding How Boost My Child's Brain Power Works

Concentration, essential in improving kid's academic stamina and brain power, can be also trained using the abacus, helping them to focus better.

Weak concentration can be a lifetime obstacle if it is not corrected at an early age, and since kids need to be involved in different processes as they use the abacus, they’ll gradually learn how to be focused on the task they’ve in hand or mind, ignoring any kinds of distraction.

Eventually, while being trained with the abacus, children will not only learn how to perform the math operations using the tool (add, subtract, multiplication and division) but learn as well how to perform them within their mind.

This is only made with high levels of concentration since they assume the abacus within their minds and perform the operations as if they were done using a real physical abacus.

Since the calculations are done mentally, children need to remember each step and its reasoning, being concentrated on finishing the task.

Thus, as the children continuously do calculations their concentration keeps on increasing, which helps them overall in their studies and school, helping them to focus on specific problems as well.

The way the child will study and understand the abacus is different for each age range (adjusted to the child's learning process).

For little kids, between 3 and 4 years old, they can use the abacus to first slide the beads and work their motor skills, matching the movement of the instructor and training her attention, to then start teaching them basic counting as they move the beads from one side to another.

Older kids, of schooled age, can start studying simple operation problems in the abacus (like addition and subtraction) and the way the beads can represent the units and decimals, before moving to more complex operations like multiplication and division.

Overall  
Starting to study the abacus can seem like a difficult method, since our brains are already coded to believe math is a hard boring subject, used to perform it under the same old rules and mechanisms, making for us to believe new approaches are complicated.

But the truth is that with the abacus there's a lot of different benefits that we can help kids develop with this methodology, giving them satisfaction and self-recognition of their achievements and skills obtained with the use of the abacus, providing them a new view of their school education.