Wooden fraction tiles and cuisenaire rods

[frogs]

Can anyone help me find something like this in wood rather than plastic? I know they exist because I've seen other people with them, but can't seem to locate them myself.

And would you recommend the wooden or the plastic cuisenaire rods? I'm thinking the wooden ones are more aesthetically pleasing, but the plastic ones slot together more satisfyingly. I know people feel strongly about cuisenaire rods, so all recommendations gratefully received.

Ds does so not get fractions (or telling the time, aaargh), so needs all the help he can get without making it feel too much like work.

Please?

My pet subject!

Have I bored you about the Tarquin site before? They do wooden Cuisenaire rods (under the "3-D Construction" heading, slightly oddly), and yes, it has to be wood because of the lovely deep colours and that heady smell. They have the other thing you're looking for too, but only in plastic ... & I could spend hours blissfully dithering around in what they do. LOADS else about fractions.

I know it's your pet topic, bink! I knew there would be opinions on it...

Olfactory nostalgia aside, what do you reckon to plastic vs. wooden cuisenaire rods? I like the idea of the plastic ones fitting together, and those are actually the ones I remember having at school (very satisfying, all that slotting together).

Will try gltc for the wooden fractions. Brightminds have the plastic versions of both, but I know I've seen people with the wooden tiles and they were lovely.

Tarquin is lovely too, but a lot of it is quite sophisticated, whereas ds is mathematically quite, um, unsophisticated.

Ooh, gltc have snap together fraction blocks (though they call them cubes, which they clearly aren't). They might neatly combine the tiles and the plastic cuisenaire rods, perhaps.

Hmm.

are these any good?

Piffle - thank you for that site! - because it has litmus paper!! I've been looking for pocket money packs of litmus paper everywhere.

We've got some plastic Cuisenaire rods (sorry, Cuisenaire purists everywhere!) and the snapping together is quite good. I used them to illustrate some equivalent fractions for DS1 (8 and in Y4 and not an intuitive mathematician). I bought them mainly for DS1 to illustrate stuff like the commutative property of addition/multiplication etc and they are great for visually reinforcing things like adding 10 or 9 etc.

I've seen the GLTC fraction tiles too and thought they looked quite good.

Thanks for that, piffle, will explore in more detail later!

I've now discovered a version of the gltc fraction towers that have the equivalent decimals and percentages on the sides, which seems like a good wheeze.

Bink, I have litmus paper! Ordered it through the lab, though. It was a mad success for a while before dd1 went to secondary school where she had real labs. With bunsen burners. And chemicals.

These are rather fine.