Book 2 of the Linear Abacus® Pocket Book Series
Are they converting centimetres to metres because they understand what’s happening — or because they’re following a rule they were taught to memorise?
The decimal number system and the metric system share the same logic. Once your child sees it, they carry it for life. A bead becomes a centimetre. A full string reaches roughly to their own height. The decimal point stops being a mystery and becomes something they can point to.
What the book does
No new tool required. This is the beauty of the Linear Abacus® — the same string that taught your child to build and name numbers now teaches them to measure the world, because it works the same way across number, algebra, and measurement.
Place Value and the Metric System takes the same string of beads that taught your child to name and build any number, and shows them it was a ruler all along. Nothing new has to be learned. The structure your child already understands is simply renamed.
This is what makes conversion concrete instead of memorised. Your child doesn’t learn the rule for converting centimetres to metres — they build it, see it, and state it themselves. By the time they write 120 cm = 1.2 m, they are not applying a formula. They are describing what they can see.
Four activities. Compact, not thin. You won’t need a new book each year or fifty rotating lessons — these are the activities that build the foundational understanding, and they are not one-off tasks. Each one can be lived in across a whole week, then returned to months later with new eyes, new questions, and a child who sees more in it than they did the first time. Your child measures their own step, renames it three ways — centimetres, decimetres, metres — and discovers that renaming a length is not a new measurement. It is the same distance, described using units they worked out the relationship between for themselves.
Who this is for
Children in grades 3–8. Parents who want to sit alongside their child and follow the questions together — the book gives you the words to say and the moves to make.
This book uses the same Linear Abacus® your child already has from Book 1 — no new equipment needed. If you don’t yet own one, the Master Place Value hang pack bundle includes both a book and a 100-bead Linear Abacus® in one box. Schools who already have class sets of the Linear Abacus® can order additional copies of the book here for new classes or replacement copies.
