cuisenaire rods?

[MathsMadMummy]

I've just seen some cuisenaire rods on Amazon. I've heard these mentioned - are they any good?

I was planning on getting a Numicon kit when DD is a bit older, they look really good, but I was wondering if anybody could tell me about cuisenaire first?

thanks :)

Oh I didn't know you could still get these!

We had them in first year infants when I was a kid (1970s)

I loved them and they really helped get an idea of sizes and numbers.

Oh these are plastic

Ours were stained wooden ones

I still think they are a good idea though.

yay!!

Buy them, they are fab. Mum still has the ones we played with as kids and they are a really good way of teaching all aspect of size and number and can be great fun.

yes I gather they are something of a nostalgia trip :o

what do you actually do with them though? I'm just wondering really if it's worth getting them as well as numicon or if it'd be more of the same IYSWIM.

looked on the official website but it's a bit useless, it just keeps trying to sell me it without telling me anything useful!

You can also get them from Yellow Moon, who also do some useful other educational stuff. I've used them with my kids quite a bit.

yay again I have to buy some now for my dc's whether they want them or not!!

I loved my rods! We learned to chant all the colours and I still remember that 4 was crimson.... (Had never heard of that colour before)

We had our own set (in a little bag in P1) and then got to use a common set in P2 . We were told that in P3 we had to do all our sums without rods!

Don't know how much help they were, but they were fun - and very memorable.

Thanks for the memory

ooh yellow moon looks like a great site.

seriously though, what do you actually do with rods?!

They can help children visualise the value of numbers and the difference between one number and another. We use a computer version as a maths support programme

I get the impression that if you could use the rods, you would be able to do the sums anyway.

Cuisenaire Rods are blocks used to teach maths each of the 10 rods has a different colour and length ? the white rod is 1cm long, the red 2cms, the light green 3cms and so on, up to a 10cm-long orange rod.

www.berkshiremathematics.com/rods.asp

nrich.maths.org/public/search.php?search=cuisenaire

Didn't know that anyone else remembered these!

I've still got mine from when I was a kid - wooden back then, can't imagine that plastic would be anywhere near so nice :)

DD liked to use them to build farms with when she was smaller (these days she mostly uses lego). The unit blocks make very good haybales . . .

More practically, I found them very useful when I was helping a friends' early teenage girls who were struggling with arithmetic & fractions in particular, having something concrete really seemed to help them.

yes they are fab and are coming back into fashion. Great for number skills and patterns. Once children know the values of each number they can see patterns really clearly.

or values of each rod I mean

Oooh I remember the 2s! They were lemon yellow and looked like sweets! The 1s were white and boring and always ended up scattering on the floor...

I was in the juniors when we used them so 1962-ish. They were brand spanking new and smelt like paint. We used them mainly to understand the concept of multiplication and division. E.g. 12 / 3. You would get a 12 and lay 3s alongside until you could fit no more. Then count the number of 3s you had used. Answer 4. Us clever clogs (swank) were set tasks to find LCDs and HCFs and were also free to explore the relationships of numbers. I used to hate the end of maths when all the rods had to be put away in their separate compartments - it took forever!

I did consider getting these for my dds but didn't in the end because I felt they were too abstract.

The wooden ones have a lovely feel to them - much more tactile than the plastic ones.
I have two full sets of wooden ones [complete] which I bought from a charity shop in Reading where the wooden rods were originally made.
One of the sets I am told is the original ones they made.

do all cuisenaire rods actually link together? or do you just line them up?

I seem to remember some linking things that clicked together in an oh-so-satisfying way, don't know what they were called though.

no they don't link

wooden ones here

and here

ideas on for how to use them

yes I'm interested in them because they make the concepts visible in a concrete way, DD is only 3.1 but so far she is very physical with learning, with things like shape and colour. I'm guessing kinaesthetic learning is more common among littluns anyway because they learn through play, but some retain that tendency more than others? I may be wrong...

Cuisenaire rods are lovely, but I reckon the no. 1 way to make maths concepts visible to a 3.1 yr old is through cake.

The one multiplication that dd has always known is 3x4 = 12 . . . because that's how my bun tins work, and because there are 3 of us, so we get 4 cakes each. Ditto fractions (2/3 of a cake each), subtraction (you have 6 sweets, I take 2 away for bad behaviour) etc. . . .