Cuisenaire rods give students a hands-on elementary school way to learn elementary math concepts, such as the four basic arithmetic operations and working with fractions.
In the early 1950s, Caleb Gattegno popularized the réglettes. This is a set of colored number rods created by the Belgian primary school teacher Georges Cuisenaire (1891-1976), who made known the rods as réglettes.
Overview
The educationalists Maria Montessori and Friedrich Froebel had used rods to represent numbers, but it was Cuisenaire who introduced their purpose to teachers across the world from the 1950s onwards. He published a book on their use in 1952 called Les nombres en couleurs. Cuisenaire, a violin player, taught music as well as arithmetic in the primary school in Thuin. He wondered why children found it easy and enjoyable to pick up a tune and yet found mathematics neither easy nor enjoyable. These comparisons with music and its representation led Cuisenaire to experiment in 1931 with a set of ten rods sawed out of wood, with lengths from 1 cm to 10 cm. Each length of rod was painted a different color and began to use these in his teaching of arithmetic. The invention remained almost unknown outside the village of Thuin for about 23 years, until Gattegno came to visit him and observe lessons in 1953. With Gattegno’s help, the use of the rods for both mathematics and language teaching was developed and made known in many countries around the world.
The Silent Way
Though primarily used for mathematics, they have also become popular in language-teaching classrooms, particularly The Silent Way. They can be used:
– to demonstrate most grammatical structures such as prepositions of place, comparatives & superlatives, determiners, tenses, adverbs of time, manner, etc.,
– to show sentence and word stress, rising and falling intonation and word groupings,
– to create a visual model of constructs, for example the English verb tense system
– to represent physical objects: clocks, floor-plans, maps, people, animals, fruit, tools, etc. which can lead to the creation of stories told by the students as in this video.
Other colored rods
In her first school, and in schools since then, Maria Montessori used colored rods in the classroom to teach concepts of both mathematics and length. This is possibly the first instance of colored rods being used in the classroom for this purpose.
Doctor Catherine Stern also coined a set of colored rods produced by staining wood with aesthetically pleasing colors.
In 1961 Seton Pollock produced the color Factor system, composed of rods from lengths 1 to 12 cm. The odd-numbered lengths have cold colors, and the even-numbered lengths have warm colors.