Cuisenaire Rods wit Mrs. Wallace

We had another lovely visit with Mrs. Wallace today. She loves to come in and show us some of the many tools that we can use in math. Last time she came she showed us rekenreks and how we can use them to count, and to solve addition/subtraction problems. Today she showed us cuisenaire rods.

 

 

I primarily thought of them as a way to teach factors of 10 and as an introduction to using base ten blocks for place value. However today the kids used these for many things-it was a great review! We used them to sort, make repeating patterns, measure, make the factors of ten, and find doubles facts. It was fantastic!

 

Of course Mrs. Wallace firmly believes in letting the kiddos experiment with new math tools before she asks them to use them for math.

 

The kiddos experimenting with the cuisenaire rods.

While experimenting with the rods some kids sorted the rods by colour, and others built structures.

 

After the kids experimented, they were given their first task-to create a repeating pattern. Mrs. Wallace and I walked around asking review questions: What is the core? What attributes did you use? How would you label your pattern?

 

Making patterns!


Next, the kids were asked to compare their rods and make them into a staircase going from largest to smallest. Paige came up with the idea of using the white rods (they are "worth" one) to help in the comparison. To be sure that our rods were in the right order from biggest to smallest we could use the white rod to be certain that the next rod grew by one.

 



 

Then Mrs. Wallace challenged the kids to find two rods that when put together were as big as the orange rod.

 

2 yellow rods= 1 orange rod.



The kiddos where then told that because they were using two yellow rods (worth 5) they had made a double for the orange rod (worth 10). The kids decided to set off to find more doubles.

 

More doubles!

Going back to the orange rod we reviewed how we had found our doubles for it. Now we wanted the kids to find all of the rods that when put together would make the orange rod.

 

 

This lead us to our final discussion about how much each rod represents. We already knew that the orange rod showed ten and the white rod was one. We discussed ways to figure out what number each rod was. Paige used her white rods to figure out what the other colours were "worth".

 

5 white=1 yellow. The yellow rod is 5!



Shawna decided to put all of her rods in order (like when we were making the stairs) and figured that the yellow rod was 5 as it was the fifth rod in her "staircase".

 

Finally we debriefed with Mrs. Wallace. We reviewed what we had done and talked about how using these new to us tools would help us during math. Of course, the kiddos begged Mrs. Wallace to return with another cool new math tool. Stay posted-I'll definitely need to invite her into our class again!

 

 

Mrs. Ashley Daley-Creamer