Linear Abacus® Games Book Class Set

You have thirty students and they are not all in the same place. Some are still counting by ones. Others are ready for multiplication. You need a resource that meets all of them — without requiring you to plan thirty different activities.

The Games Book Class Set gives every student in your class a Linear Abacus® in their hands and 18 deep games that do something no other resource does: the same game generates genuinely different mathematical thinking depending on where the student is. A grade 1 student builds counting-on strategies. A Year 3 student reasons with place value. A Year 5 student discovers the associative property — all in the same game, in the same lesson, at the same table.

This is not differentiation by task. It is differentiation by thinking — built into the tool itself.

The Class Set includes:

30 individual Linear Abacus® bead strings (30-bead) — one per student, stored in drawstring bag
x30 dice (a mix of 6 and 10 sided)
One copy of The Linear Abacus® Games Book (2nd Edition, A5, 96 pages)

Every game includes four things that make your job easier:

Clear game instructions — written for teachers and parents, ready to use without additional preparation.

Probing questions — the exact questions to ask while students play. These are not comprehension checks. They are the questions that surface mathematical thinking and show you what a student genuinely understands.

Examples of student reasoning — real illustrations of how students at different levels think through the same game. These show you what to look for and what to listen for.

Reflections — a plain-language guide to the mathematical ideas at work in each game, so you can see the learning trajectory from Foundation to Year 6 and beyond.

Why schools come back to this book year after year

Most classroom resources are built for a single year level. You use them once and move on. The Games Book is different. It spans Year 1 to Year 6 — and into secondary — because the mathematical structures it explores (addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, arrays, equivalence, fractions, square and triangular numbers) are the structures that deepen year after year. The games do not change. The thinking does.

In a recent school program, a Grade 1/2 cohort and a Grade 3/4 cohort both used the same game from this book over a five-week period. Without any modification. The grade 1/2 students developed counting-on strategies and began reasoning with colour to identify groups of ten. The Grade 3/4 students — who had arrived still counting on their fingers — began splitting numbers using place value, recognising number bonds, and connecting addition to multiplication. Same game. Same tool. Profoundly different thinking.

That is what a genuine cross-level resource looks like. And it is why the Games Book is the single most versatile product in the Linear Abacus® range.

Free support built in

Your class set purchase connects you to a complete support system at no extra cost:

A step-by-step blog walks you through every game strand — what the mathematics is, what to listen for, and how to extend the learning.

Video demonstrations on the Linear Abacus® YouTube channel show each game in action.

A sequence guide on the website maps every game to mathematical concepts and year levels, so your teaching team can plan together across the school.

The Linear Abacus® maths community (860+ educators and families) gives you a place to ask questions, share discoveries, and see what other schools are doing.

One resource. Every level. Year after year.

The Games Book Class Set is the entry point to a complete, backed by theoretically research — from year 1 through to secondary school. Every product in the Linear Abacus® range builds naturally on the last. Start here. The thinking will take you further than you expect.

★★★★★

Through using the Linear Abacus and participating in the professional learning and coaching sessions, I began to see the “why” behind the concepts. For the first time, I felt like I was genuinely teaching mathematics, not just delivering it.

That shift in my own understanding transformed my confidence. I found myself approaching lessons with excitement, asking better questions, and being more responsive to student thinking. My enjoyment of maths grew alongside my students’, and they became more engaged, curious, and willing to explore different strategies because they could see connections and make sense of what they were learning.

It’s been such a rewarding change, both professionally and personally.
Cindy Guanzon- Grade 1/2 teacher