From five-minute sessions to mental math in seconds: Mila's story

Mila started mental arithmetic in September, in first grade. The early lessons were hard: she mixed up the beads on the abacus, lost track after the very first addition and tired quickly — she couldn't practise for more than five minutes at a time.

The first breakthrough: from the abacus to imagination

After two months of regular lessons and five minutes of daily practice at home, Mila stopped fumbling the bead movements — they became automatic. That was the moment she first tried to solve an example "in her head", without looking at the abacus, and got it right on the first attempt.

In the parent app, Mila's mum saw every day how many examples were solved and how long they took — and made a point of praising not the right answers, but the speed that kept improving week after week.

"I used to worry my daughter would quit within a month. But when I saw in the app that she was choosing the harder level herself, I realised she genuinely enjoys it," — Mila's mum.

Today

Now, six months in, Mila adds and subtracts three-digit numbers in a few seconds — faster than most adults can type them into a calculator. She asks Anna Petrovna for "harder examples" herself and races her groupmates for speed.

For Anna Petrovna, this story is a typical example of how the methodology works with regular practice: not one-off breakthroughs, but steady, almost invisible day-by-day improvement that after six months adds up to a result that surprises even the parents.