Adding numbers

When I was 7 years old, I was required to learn about money. In those days the United Kingdom (along with most of what had been the British Empire) used pounds, shillings and pence as their currency system. There were 12 pennies in a shilling, and 20 shillings in a pound. Suddenly I had to learn to count up to 12 before my pennies turned into a shilling. I was taught to imagine this as a pile of copper pennies which grew taller as more were added, and when they were 12 high, those 12 were slid through a gate into the next column where they changed into a single silver shilling coin. Any copper coins which were above the lintel at the top of the gate (because there were more than 12 pennies there) didn't get into the shillings column, and fell back down to the bottom of the pennies column ready to have more placed on top of them later.
This mechanical analogy made the abstract concept of number base real, because at that age I was still a concrete thinker. It didn't matter what the number base was, all I had to do was adjust the height of the gate lintel. So for converting shillings into pounds, I just used a similar system, but with a bigger gate.
What is important in today's world is that the technique is just as applicable for adding when using base 10 as it is for any other base. When adding numbers, children can imagine that they have got a big pile of pennies (or perhaps I should say "new pennies" to distinguish them from real pennies, which had Britannia seated majestically on the reverse, were large and were capable of buying a bread roll all on their own) which slide through a gate whose height is 10, and those that get through turn mmagically into a ten penny piece, whereas those that get wiped off by the lintel stay in the pennies column, and fall down to the bottom of that colummn with a mighty crash. How much more fun is that than just adding numbers? If it is more fun it'll keep the child's interest longer, they'll enjoy maths more, they will become better at the subject. This is what we aim to do at Puppet Maths. We aim to make maths fun by appealing to children's imaginations. Once we have their imagination, then we can make them do well at maths.