Was quite reluctant to enroll my daughter in any abacus program since she has many other enrichment classes to attend every week already. However, one day when doing math exercises with her at home, she asked me why some of her friends in school can count so fast without even using their fingers. This is when I decided to enroll her to CMA. She is able to understand the formula very fast and is now able to do quick addition and subtraction. The progress is fast because they have to do a lot of repetitive exercises in the workbook which will begin with shorter series of numbers to answer to longer and longer series of numbers to answer. What is different about CMA method is that it used two hand instead of one hand, The reason being that using two hands actually helps train both the left and right brain and reduces the chance of careless mistakes.

My son is attending the class twice a week at Punggol branch. The CMA abacus uses the Japanese "soroban", meaning it has 1 bead(representing 5) at the top and 4 below. This means you have formulas for borrowing/giving to the top bead as well as the next more significant bead. The school specialize in 2-hand abacus which I feel is good for him to add and subtract easier for primary school Maths homework. Before this, he was adding and subtracting slower by the use of counting with his fingers. Problem with counting with his fingers are when the addition and subtraction gets more difficult with numbers greater than 10. However, after sending him to the abacus class, he is able to think faster and do the sums faster. One drawback though with this is that he tends to be quite careless. There will also be a practice book that my son will have to complete each lesson and after lesson as homework. I believe for him to pick this up better and faster I will usually go through with him at home while completing his homework exercise.