The Stamp Game

My children brought home the contents of their cubbies at the end of the school year.   This included anything we were wondering if we’d lost as well as some things that weren’t ours.   They also brought home some work they’d been doing over the last week of school.    My son’s bag contained a small sheet of paper in which he’d added together two four-digit numbers.   He’d brought home these “final results” pages before, never bothering to tell us anything about it.

Here’s the one he brought home on the last day of school:

From an adult’s perspective, this is just adding two numbers but from a five-year-old’s experience and understanding of numbers, this is a lot more work to figure out.   I didn’t know what the work was called so I just went upstairs to ask my son and was told, “oh, that’s the stamp game”.  

Notice on the top above the first number there is a single dot (digits) a line (tens) a square (hundreds) and a cube (thousands).   Numbers are taught by physical representations, with the units being one golden bead, the tens being ten beads on a wire, the hundreds being a grid of ten by ten beads and the thousands a full-on cube of ten by ten by ten golden beads.  Ah, here’s a picture showing what I mean:

In order to add those two four-digit numbers, my son translates what he can see as magnitude (the beads) into a numerical representation with the stamps.    He figures out the addition problem through what I’m going to call, “exceptionally long addition” but he has a good grasp of how addition happens.   The fact that it’s a large number doesn’t really matter, because the process is the same.  

I notice in the example he did there was no carrying over into the next larger digit, possibly as he’s new to this area of work.    It’s interesting to see how the “game” is played.   My son doesn’t seem to think addition anything other than the norm at his age.  

The Big Boy Update:  I told my son it was time to help with the dishes this morning as I watched him constructing something from the tubes he’s still obsessed with.   He didn’t even look up when he told me, “Mom, I have some business to do first.”

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:   My daughter had been having a tea party with Nana and Papa this morning and when they had to leave she asked me if I would join her.   I told her I would be glad to join her as soon as I’d made my coffee.   She said, “don’t worry, I will pause it.   I will rewind it to the beginning and start over.”   She did, and we had a lovely tea party with her, my husband and son for the next hour.