Cuisenaire Rods are brightly colored wooden sticks. Technically, they’re “proportionally sized rectangular parallelepipeds.” (But only say that if you want to hear your 3 year old repeat something really cute!)

The “proportional” thing is important. The white ones are 1cm square, the red ones are twice as long and each color is 1cm more than the next color.

I’m anticipating many articles and videos on how to teach with these (since  the possibilities with these things are virtually unlimited), so I thought I would start a running series. Here are the ideas and the links to the articles/videos:

• Cuisenaire Rods – graphing and practicing coordinate pairs (see video below)
• Cuisenaire Rod Art Inspires Thought and Decision – more graphing and thinking like a mathematician
• Cuisenaire Rods Go Pythagorean! – figuring out the coordinates on “tilted” rods on a graph
• Playing with Algebra Concepts
• Adding Fractions with Cuisenaire Rods
• Relations – Greater Than and Less Than
• Algebra – Solving Equations with Beautiful Colors
• Set Theory

Creating Coordinate Pairs with Pictures

Share your own ideas on how to use Cuisenaire Rods in the comments!

P.S. I spent my hard earned money on these at Teacher Heaven. This small set was $15 in the store, but I see you can get it for less than $13 online. 

This is also shared on Works for Me Wednesday.

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