Cuisenaire Rods provide endless opportunities to introduce, investigate, and reinforce key math topics such as addition, subtraction, geometry, measurement, multiplication, division and much more.
Cuisenaire Rods come in 10 colour-related sizes and also electronically as virtual manipulatives!
This week, Year 3 has carried out a number of Cuisenaire Rod investigations. Take a look at them busy applying their measuring, adding and multiplication skills to solve the different problems.
First, they used rulers to measure each Cuisenaire Rod and recorded the length and width in their square-papered Maths books.
Some of the children then became train mechanics, fixing trains together. Each train that they made had to measure 10 cm long, but could have different numbers of carriages with varying lengths. Look at some of the different trains they made.
Other children become designers, creating giant Cuisenaire Rod sets. They made paper prototypes for each rod, making them 5 and 10 times bigger. This involved them using their knowledge of the 5 and 10 times table, and having to accurate measuring with rulers and metre sticks. Sometimes the paper wasn’t long enough to make a rod and they had to solve the problem by cutting and fixing more than one piece together.
Come and see our work on display in our classroom and find out what parts of the investigations we found the most challenging!
