Oh wow! Cuisenaire rods are both esoteric, and something I have seen used as an amazing teaching tool.<p>How do you get 5 and 6 year olds to go from playing with Cuisenaire rods as blocks to modeling algebraic equations and learning fractions?<p>The teacher, Simon Gregg, instructs us. He began a running Twitter thread for his 2016-2017 school year where you can follow his students' journey.<p>You see him first giving students cuisenaire rods for free play, then over a period of time getting them to create "100" faces, e.g. a representation of a face that had the equivalent of 100 blocks.<p>By the end of the year the students had not only modeled algebraic equations, but it had given Mr. Gregg an entry point to teaching the students (5 and 6 year olds!) algebraic notation. LOTS was learned in the interim.<p>It should be a case study in pedagogy.<p>Mind you, Cuisenaire rods are just the tool. The teacher is who helped make them amazing.<p>Some links to Simon Gregg's work. (BTW, he teaches in France and when he refers to 'K3' that's the equivalent of kindergarten in the U.S.)<p>An end of year reflection:
<a href="http://followinglearning.blogspot.com/2017/07/looking-back-looking-forward-few.html" rel="nofollow">http://followinglearning.blogspot.com/2017/07/looking-back-l...</a><p>Cardinality, ordinality and developments with the Cuisenaire rods in K3:
<a href="http://followinglearning.blogspot.com/2017/01/" rel="nofollow">http://followinglearning.blogspot.com/2017/01/</a><p>Compendium of his tweets chronicling the use of Cuisenaire rods in his classroom:
<a href="https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&vertical=default&q=cuisenaire%20from%3ASimon_Gregg%20since%3A2016-09-01%20until%3A2017-07-01&src=typd&lang=en-gb" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&vertical=default&q=cuise...</a>