Melissa & Doug Classic Wooden Abacus
Melissa & Doug Classic Wooden Abacus
Melissa & Doug Classic Wooden Abacus Reviews
Before we got a chance to review the instructions, my 51/2 yr old had begun to use the abacus for counting, adding, subtraction and even making pictures!!! My 2 yr old also enjoys the beads for colors and counting. Exactly what we’d hoped for! It’s sturdy and large enough to be fun yet easily handled by the youngest.
The colors are bright and the frame is thick and durable. It is a nice way to add a little fun to math. Plus since it is so well made, when my 10 month old wants to play with it I don’t worry about her or the toy.
I’ve owned this for a year and my son has gone from just watching me move it around as a newborn, to rolling the balls, to sliding them back and forth. Its great because it makes sounds, its large and colorful, and moves.
The choking hazard warning comes from the fact that the wooden pieces used to hold the thing together are inadequately glued. Today, my 18 month old son finally succeeded in getting the top wooden dowel to rotate. I took the toy away and was able to confirm that with a little prying on the wood, the metal bars would lose alignment and be able to release all the little balls (which at least have a hole in them, but, still…)
I drilled a hole slightly smaller than the threads of a drywall screw down the center of the dowel, and one slightly larger than the threads – just slightly smaller than the head of the screw – in a matching location on the outer (left and right) two wooden pieces. By doing this, I was able to tightly fasten the dowel with a screw at either end without having any of the head of the screw stick out of the wood. Now, the dowel cannot rotate at all because of the additional friction on its ends imposed by the screw.
I will be monitoring the base of the unit to make sure that the wood does not separate here either, but if it does, a similar solution should remedy the problem.
I give this toy a 5 in everything except durability, where it gets a mere 1. It’s too bad America’s “disposable culture” doesn’t allow for the concept of repairability – it was easy to fix with tools everyone should have in their home or apartment.
This abacus should be used for school age children starting kindergarten, not before. And it is to be used for learning to count, and not for the sound the beads make when you shake it.
My daughter just finished her kindergarten and getting ready for First Grade. While she can read, she had been struggling with additions until she began counting the beads on this abacus. Considering it took humans millions of years to start having words for numbers there should be great appreciation for how abstract a number system is. Already she’s finding shortcuts in the abacus to speed up her calculations by matching sets of beads in different rows and looking at problems from different perspectives as Archimedes once did (see The Archimedes Codex: How a Medieval Prayer Book Is Revealing the True Genius of Antiquity’s Greatest Scientist.) It is only through reasonable practice that the beads of the abacus will shape the beads of her mind.
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