The Bar Model Method is the key feature of the wellknown Singapore Math which refers to the teaching strategies adopted in the textbooks written by a project team led by Dr Kho Teck Hong of the Curriculum Development Institute of Singapore in 1980. Since then
the bar model method gained international attention and adoption. The method involves a procedure of drawing bar models to visualise the concepts of ratios and fractions
and to use them in different situations in word problems. The original idea of using
line segments instead of bars to solve problems dates back to Euclid in Book V of his
monumental work Elements about 2300 years ago. In statistics, bars are effectively
used to construct bar charts for representing data and information. The bar model method is a powerful technique to solve certain types of challenging word problems
that appeared in the Singapore Primary School Leaving Examination (PSLE) papers. At the Primary Olympiad level, there are many advanced counting problems which require advanced problem solving skills [5]. The advanced bar model method was developed to solve these problems in [2]. Some well-known counting problems such as chicken-rabbit
problems, allocation problems and cow-grass problems have been dealt with in [3] and
[4]. These efforts dispute the argument by some people that the bar model approach
is limited only to teaching simple concepts of ratios and fractions and solving
word problems at primary level. In this article, we will give some examples to show
how the bar model method can be used in solving challenging counting problems. We
begin by mentioning the basic concepts for the bar modelling approach.