Counting to one hundred on the abacus

Here's Beatriz and Maria showing how to count to one hundred on the abacus:

What great abacus-counting!  There were a few slips, but you can see they've really worked it out!
 Maria has really joined in with everything since she joined us at the start of the time, and Beatriz has been great at making sure she understands the English, with Spanish translation when necessary!

See, Think... Wonder

Miss Whittaker has made us these great posters:

and that's what we've been doing.
Together we looked closely at this image:

We saw a lot of things:

Then some thinking... Tibo thought it looked like a competition. One man looked Asian and the other European, and it looked like the woman was the judge. Felix thought the woman looked like a god. Kirill thought she looked like a Fairy of Mathematics.

Next we got into pairs and wrote what we saw and thought:

 

 

 

 

Next week we'll see what questions the picture brings to mind...

Roman numbers and an abacus

We've been looking at how Roman numbers work.

When it gets on to the big numbers, as B. said, our numbers are easier:

The Romans maybe found them hard to use too.  They didn't have electricity, so they didn't have a calculator.

Instead, some of them used an abacus:

Strangely, it's very similar to the abacus used in Japan:

We watched the first few minutes of this to see how to count on the abacus:

Then we had a look at an online abacus: