

Cuisenaire rods - pdubroy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuisenaire_rods

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aethertap
I'm using these rods to help my daughter (6 years old) with number sense right
now. I've found them to be pretty effective at helping her build the concepts
around manipulating numbers for arithmetic. The only pitfall we've run into
was in connecting the manipulation of the rods with the manipulation of the
more abstract numbers.

They've really helped in the area of modeling the problems. Depending on where
you put the unknown, there are several ways to ask the same arithmetic
question, eg:

    
    
        _ + 2 = 5
        3 + 2 = _
        3 + _ = 5
    

Using the rods to model the knowns and unknowns has been really helpful for
her to connect the abstract ideas of the equations with the reality of what
the numbers mean, and how the manipulations work on each side of the equality.

Overall I think they're a pretty powerful tool, but they require some
creativity to really get the most value from them, and they definitely require
the use of other learning aids in conjunction like number lines, 99-charts,
and base-ten blocks. We also use money, marbles, and other things to try to
avoid getting too dependent on a particular manipulative.

Actually the biggest breakthrough we had was making up a card game to learn
complements of ten. If you've played "set" you know the basic idea - we lay
down 12 cards numbered 0-10, and we compete to see who can make pairs or
triples that sum to ten the fastest. She loves it, and she's gotten to where I
really have to work to keep up.

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jonah
We used them in my education too.

Do you have the track?[1] It can help with the concrete/abstract correlation.

[1] [http://marcialmiller.com/wordpress/wp-
content/uploads/2011/0...](http://marcialmiller.com/wordpress/wp-
content/uploads/2011/01/Staircasesandrodtracks.jpg)

~~~
aethertap
I don't... thanks for the tip. That looks like it would be really handy.

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deepnet
The brilliance of the cuisinaire rods is they are accurate and so the way they
fit together was immensly pleasing to me when I was little.

The smallest one is a cube, then a red rod exactly two cubes.

I loved the cuisinaire rods I had as a child, the colours were harmonious and
I can still count in that spectrum.

None of my other blocks made patterns as well, they were just innacurate and
at a certain age I loved patterns & ziggurats.

They were my absolute favourite building blocks and perhaps helped me become
numerate, I certainly knew how many red blocks matched a green and understood
add, multiply, & divide operations with coloured blocks intuitively before I
knew number symbols.

I think the only change I would try is to add the base 10 number symbols to
each one which might make the transition to symbols easier ( maybe put binary
notation on the other side* ;)

*[ my dad was a programmer so I learned binary, octal and hex counting as well as base 10 ]

I didn't have the numbered track that seems really cool but there was a very
long one in my box, longer than 36 units, maybe it was 100, can't remember,
was less fun than the coloured ones.

That the numbers on the track are not coloured according to the blocks seems
odd, it is not quite as pretty as the blocks. Perhaps putting symbols on the
blocks would make them less appealing to the infant mind ?

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mdpm
These are amazing, primarily because they teach the related concepts of
numeracy and geometry/scale all at once. From free play and 'building' to
patterns, simple arithmetic, they just keep providing a direct physical
analogue for numerical operations. Used on me, and on my children.

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codezero
I wouldn't have remembered that I actually used this if this wasn't posted
here!

I don't recall when or in what depth, but I definitely recall them being
involved in my education when I was learning addition and maybe even
multiplication.

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aaron695
Cool nostalgia

Like to see some evidence they work and to know why they have gone out of
fashion.

[edit] Reading the conclusion in one thesis, their findings were the colors
did more harm than good. But the concept of using blocks might have befit.

[http://www.worldcat.org/title/study-of-the-cuisenaire-
gatteg...](http://www.worldcat.org/title/study-of-the-cuisenaire-gattegno-
method-as-opposed-to-an-eclectic-approach-for-promoting-growth-in-operational-
technique-and-concept-maturity-with-first-grade-children/oclc/166335225)

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MacsHeadroom
My early math education was based on these rods, as well as a stackable Lego-
like plastic clone[0].

I used to think it didn't have very much impact. But in retrospect, I think it
really opened my young mind to math as spatial reasoning. It wasn't long
before I could visualize the answer, or at least a very close approximation,
to complex algebra much more quickly than I could do actual calculations.

[0] [http://www.mathusee.com/](http://www.mathusee.com/)

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valine
Wow, that brings back memories. My parents had me using these from preschool
to probably fourth grade. They sure made math a lot more fun. It's funny, I
can actually trace my number synesthesia back to the colors of the pieces. The
only exception was the number 2. I remember being frustrated that the
Cuisenaire 2s were red when 2 was so obviously yellow. Sometimes I would even
avoid using those pieces, just because they didn't match the numbers I was
writing down.

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TrevorJ
These were used in my math education. Theoretically, it's a good way to
explain base ten but I don't think it helped me much.

Oddly enough dominoes somehow lodged themselves in my mind though, I still
picture the number ten as two sets of five dots arranged.

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gohrt
how is "base 10" related to these rods?

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kenjackson
The rods often (typically?) have 10 units on them.

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olefoo
More than that, they are 1cm^3 for the base unit and the orange rods are 10
cm's long. The precision is pretty good on the ones I had growing up. 10 of
the long rods fit a meter measuring stick to within the precision of the
markings on the ruler.

If you wanted to use them to teach continuous variables, it would be easy to
do so by analogy using the volume of the numbers.

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justincormack
I had these as a child. I think I learned multiplication more from Lego blocks
but I liked them.

~~~
deepnet
I liked lego much later than cuisinaire but lego was not based on a unit cube
like cuisinaire.

Lego has a different unit height than unit width.

Cuisinaire were better for flat math rather than cubic math ziggurats that I
dimly recall building.

~~~
deepnet
\\\ _correction_

replace "Cuisinaire were..." with "Lego were better for flat math rather than
the cubic math ziggurats..."

Large Cuisinaire would be good, one could start younger like Duplo but
cuisinaire - it seems to me there is a lot of value playing with cuisinaire at
a younger age, before any numbers are introduced.

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mml
We had "unit cubes". We used them to ... something. Still terrible at
arithmetic.

