Visually impaired children show their maths skills in local competition

EIGHT children who work with the Bright Eyes Trust centre wrote their Abagility Maths KZN Regional Exam papers on Saturday, October 7, at the Bright Eyes Trust Centre in Musgrave.

The Abagility Maths Club offers ‘abacus agility’, a programme that not only gives children the advantages that the Japanese abacus maths technique provides, but also teaches children how to apply this method to their school maths and in their daily lives.

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Abagility Maths Club is a local company established in KZN by Tracy Hauptfleisch. In 2009, she identified a Japanese abacus maths programme that she felt would make a massive difference to the development of not only her own children, but to other children out there, as well. She chose to create her own programme to do just that and launched the Abagility Maths Club programme in January 2015.

The founders of Bright Eyes Trust – a non-profit organisation that provides care, education and support for visually impaired children and their caregivers – found out about the programme in 2022, and although the logistics for the children that benefit from the organisation would be different, Carron Strachan and Cathryn Lee Aylett from Bright Eyes Trust were determined to get their kids involved in the programme.

“When Cathryn came to me about this programme, which I knew was invariably for sighted children, I realised that the whole thing would have to be adapted for our kids to get involved. Now, because I am visually impaired, I acted as a guinea pig for this programme. Tracy from Abagility Maths came in, she explained the programme to me, Cathryn and I went through the training to become Abagility Maths instructors, and then once I got through the training, we knew that our kids could do it. We did the training at the beginning of 2022, and we had two children from our after-school programme whom we decided, with their families, to start training.

“Bearing in mind that everything is designed and laid out for sighted children, the advantage was that the abacus they work with was something they could touch and feel. Within six months of the two children starting on the programme, they wrote the KZN Regional Exam papers, along with about 150 to 200 sighted children, and they got silver medals,” said Strachan.

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Aylett said the eight competitors from the Bright Eyes Trust Centre, the youngest being in Grade One and the oldest being in Grade Seven, were extremely keen to be a part of the programme this year.

“Last weekend, we had to do their exam here because unfortunately, the venue for the KZN Regional Exams this year could not accommodate the needs of our kids, so we needed to be separate so we could call out the maths sums for the children and they could call out the answers. Thankfully, Tracy came forward, and she agreed that we would test our children under the same conditions here at the Bright Eyes Trust Centre.”

Aylett says that the prize-giving, which is based on the results of the exam, will be held at Durban High School on Saturday, October 14, and she has high hopes for the children from the Bright Eyes Trusts Centre and is certain they have performed exceptionally well in the exams. “At the prize-giving, some of our kids will be doing a demonstration to show other organisations and schools that visually impaired children can also take part in the Abagility Maths Club programme.”

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