On January 27th, we had the privilege of attending a Professional Development Day with Carole Fullerton, which focused on numeracy in primary classrooms. Carole is a incredible independent consultant working with teachers, school districts, classrooms, school-based leaning teams, and parents in and around British Columbia to promote mathematical thinking and strategies for all. Today’s sessions was engaging, insightful, and filled with practical strategies that I can’t wait to bring into my classroom!

Cuisenaire Rods: What are they?

Cuisenaire Rods are versatile collections of rectangular rods of 10 colours with each colour corresponding to a different length. The proportional relationships between the pieces and the colour wheel connections make Cuisenaire rods both aesthetically pleasing and mathematically significant. Connecting the rods to the colour wheel, it makes sense.

Connection to the Colour Wheel

  • “The red family” (red, purple and brown, representing 2, 4 and 8).
  • “The green-blue family” (light green, dark green and blue, representing 3, 6 and 9.
  • “The yellow family” (yellow and orange, representing 5 and 10 respectively).
  • The rods representing 1 and 7 were painted in white and black.

These math manipulatives have endless opportunities to introduce, investigate, and reinforce key math topics such as addition, subtraction, geometry, measurement, multiplication and division.

Implementing Cuisenaire Rods in the Classroom

There is many ways to use cuisenaire rods in your classroom, and there is no better way to learning through play. Hands-on-activities are fun and engaging for students, as Carole taught us.

Games for students to play!

  • “Guess the Rod”: Tell students to put 3 or 4 rods in their hands, shake them up, and without looking guess the length and the colour of the rod. This allows for students to get familiar with each rod, and what colour represents which length.
  • “Train Building”: Get students to grab one colour, and ask them to make as many “trains” as they can that are the same number, or length to that rod.
  • “Roll, Roll, Roll, Then Build”: Have students roll a ten sided die, to times, each time they roll the die match the number from the dice to the Cuisenaire rod. When they have 10 rods, have students build a picture, then draw the picture.
  • “Roll it, Find it”: Get students in groups of two, 1st student will pick one rod, the 2nd student will find the rod that makes 10. You can also use this game with making bigger numbers, and introducing the “teen numbers”. Explain that “teen numbers” is 10 and 3 is 13.
  • “Cross Curricular Activities”: In early years education, there is many books that use literacy and numeracy, that helps understand the sequence in the book. Using books like “Ten on the Sled” by Kim Norman or “Quack and Count” by Keith Baker are great examples to have students use the rods to count and match the sequence in the story.
  • “Line is up”: When introducing multiplication in the classroom, use the idea of skip counting. Pick two rods, have student line up the rods until they are the same length, then count the rods by that number. Students can now skip count and find fact families, and understand the concept of Lowest Common Multiples.

Carole Fullerton held a specactural Professional Development Day, how teachers the use of Cuisenaire Rods in our classrooms can be fun and engaging. Students will develop a mathematical competence by using conceptual understanding, problem solving, hands on activities, peer and teacher discussion, math fluency and literacy.

George Cuisenaire quotes ““We can make math engaging and improve kids’ understanding at the same time. What we need are tools to make it hands-on!”.

Shared by: