Originally posted by: BrownTown
Well, now I understand what these all mean since I remember seeing the blocks when my mom was a math teacher. I think the point is just that is allows you to quantify an abstract concept like numbers into a physical entity such as blocks. I guess it has a use in so far as it is EXTREMELY important in math to understand that every usefull representation and calculation we do needs to be referenced back to the physical world. Having said that, I would just hope you learn the basics at the same time since an abstract type excersize doesn't help you when you don't even know the concrete numerical manipulations.
I can't really remeber what all i did at that age. I know that in first grade we learned long division and multiplication and had to memorize the mulitiples of each number 12 or lower with the others (IE: 12*5, 5*9 ...) Can't remember what we did in second grade, but whatever it was once you have the basic operations (additon, subtraction, multiplication, division) down than a huge class of problems opens up to you. So I'd guess it was simply doing problems with these operation while increasing the difficulty. (word problems were always my enemy at that age).