This guy is a sponge!

He absorbs things but I never know what has been soaked up until he wrings himself out, however infrequently. I used to think that J couldn't count by fives. We used the abacus, but counting by fives to 100 took ten minutes as he slowly pushed the beads back and forth. A few days later, frustrated, I took it away and told him to do it without the abacus. No problem. It took less than a minute.

We had another such breakthrough today. While working on a sheet of two-digit addition and subtraction problems, I couldn't find the abacus so I told him just to go for it and "see the abacus in his mind" while I read to the girls. (Of course we were reading Petunia's Christmas - it has to be Petunia for my 2-year-old!)

He's gotten about three wrong out of twenty. Not too bad for the first time without manipulatives. If I'd found the abacus, however, he'd still be chugging away with it.