Toby keeps bringing me his coins, wanting me to tell him how much money he has. Usually I try to answer his questions simply without 'teaching' as he tends to like to work things out for himself. He's been bringing me the same coins for several days, however (a 50p, a 20p, a 2p and a penny) and he can grasp adding the 50p to the 2p and the 1p but couldn't work out what to do about the 20p so I got out the abacus which has only ever been used for making patterns before now.
I showed him how the prongs could represent hundreds, tens and 1's and how to put on 5 beads to represent 50p and so on and then we could just count up the beads and write them down after to know how much money he had. This seemed to really appeal to him and he spent a few minutes with his coins trying it out for himkself. We soon got back to telling without teaching as he spent a good ten minutes putting amounts of beads on the various prongs and having me tell him what number it represented, which really seems to be the best way that he learns at the moment.
