I'll bite as a "preschool homeschooler", haha! I let my DS2.5 play with a simple calculator as an experiment. I think for self-teaching the concepts of arithmetic, it can work for some children who learn through experiments. The key in my mind is to use the calculator as either an early stage tool to intuit an underlying concept or as a late-stage tool for basic computations once mastery is achieved in pre-algebra/algebra and thr computations become trivial or mechanical to the question at hand. Otherwise, I think the student should be the calculator.
Meeting school tomorrow night to gauge their readiness for letting her do the 'after schooling' Maths during regular Maths classes instead - wish me luck folks...
Fingers crossed!
