Tracy Hauptfleisch, Daniele (Grade R) Hillcrest Pre-Primary, KZN

Daniele is in grade R and she has achieved top ratings for the basic numeracy that they are assessed on at this age. I have observed a definite improvement in Daniele's confidence levels. Daniele assists me with my SEMAS presentations and demonstrations to parents and she confidently stands up to demonstrate the skills learned through SEMAS, at times to 200 parents.

Daniele has been doing SEMAS for a year now. At the age of 5, she easefully moves through the Grade 1 maths work books. I am extremely impressed with Daniele's development over the past year. Although she is only in Grade R, she is able to mentally compute addition and subtraction sums with ease and confidence in seconds using the technique of visualising her abacus. She has not learned any other maths techniques at school, and therefore for her, SEMAS is the only way to do Maths.

She does not even consider "pulling up her fingers" to count. I have noticed her concentration has greatly improved, she is thinking "out of the box" and thus her problem solving capability has improved in all walks of her life. She is able to write and recognize numbers into the 100's which is quite rare for a child her age. She truly loves SEMAS and loves working with numbers. She takes out her SEMAS books at any opportunity she gets (with no encouragement from me).

She is very competitive and seems to have an insatiable desire to constantly learn more. I am very sure that when she goes to Grade 1 next year she will excel with any number related learning that she encounters. As a SEMAS Instructor, I am daily in awe at what a child of her age can achieve, and she has helped me to realise that it is us as parents that set the limits on our children's learning by assuming that they are too young to understand something as complex and abstract as maths can be. SEMAS makes it so easy for them, and the sky is the limit.