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Math games.
Mar. 25th, 2009 09:44 pmAlex has been incredibly interested in math and number relationships lately. We bought her a set of Cuisenaire rods, which are a "math manipulative" - a tool for making mathematical relationships concrete so that children can better understand theories and concepts. Cuisenaire rods are slender pieces of wood in graduated sizes from a 1cm cube to a 10x1x1. Each rod size is a different color. They can be used to represent the numbers 1-10. Our set came with 155 rods, so there's plenty to play with.
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serenejournal was awesome enough to send us a 1970s-era "Cuisenaire Idea Book" for grades PK-2. It helped me understand much better how the rods are supposed to be used. I had thought that you would assign a number to each rod and then use the rods to model solutions to numerical math problems; as a result, I was rather perplexed when our set of rods showed up and they didn't have numbers printed on them. The Idea Book makes it clear that, although you can (and do) teach about rod-number correspondence, much of what you do with them is number-free. You use them to explore and model mathematical relationships conceptually.
I'm interested in keeping a record of how this all works, so I'm going to write about our Cuisenaire rod explorations here from time to time. Feel free to skip it if you're not interested in math or math education! ( Read more... )
serenejournal was awesome enough to send us a 1970s-era "Cuisenaire Idea Book" for grades PK-2. It helped me understand much better how the rods are supposed to be used. I had thought that you would assign a number to each rod and then use the rods to model solutions to numerical math problems; as a result, I was rather perplexed when our set of rods showed up and they didn't have numbers printed on them. The Idea Book makes it clear that, although you can (and do) teach about rod-number correspondence, much of what you do with them is number-free. You use them to explore and model mathematical relationships conceptually.I'm interested in keeping a record of how this all works, so I'm going to write about our Cuisenaire rod explorations here from time to time. Feel free to skip it if you're not interested in math or math education! ( Read more... )
