Teacher Discussion Forums

Can anyone tell me where I can get hold of counting rods?
I've been looking on the internet but can only find books and not the actual rods.

Maybe they are "out of style" now. I looked a little too. I remember someone giving a demonstration using them for ESL many (many) years ago. They have some other counter type things, but I didn't see any rods. Maybe you can adapt another shape. :p

Hey all!

What, in heaven's name, are counting rods?

peace,
revel.

Cusinaire rods? Cuisinsaire? Cousin kitchen cuisine?

Yes! Cuisenaire rods. That was the name. Here's a link I found:

http://www.homeschoolingsupply.com/Lear ... ER7481.htm

Good morning.

And I thought I had studied "new math"!¡!

Never heard of counting Cuisenaire rods in my life. The more one learns the more one needs to learn!

peace,
revel.

Cheers for that
And I feel special to have introduced people to the world of the rods!

I had to use these things in my TESOL course some years ago.

The idea of using shapes, numbers and colours is quite clever but for those of us who are colour blind...

We used these rods in the 1970's in West Vancouver, Canada and the kids went ahead in Math so fast we could hardly keep up. It was especially good for the kids who had trouble in Math.
I have used them for teaching grammar as well - red for verbs, green for adjectives, etc. and it gives the kids an idea of how a sentence is constructed. Many kids didn't put in greens or adjectives at all, for example, and it showed when they built up the coloured rods under their work. It also helped them to compare the tenses of nouns and verbs so they matched. They could also see phrases as I tried to keep noun phrases under the same shades of colour and the verb phrases in another. I think there was a method of teaching called, "The Silent Way" that used this method and the students could see their mistakes quickly because they didn't have the same coloured rods as their fellow students, so it was a visual way to allow corrections without a lot of fuss.
The disadvantage is that you have to take some time to teach the colours and for the students to learn the colours. It never seemed to be a very long process and was kind of fun. Then they graduated to using coloured pencils to put boxes around the words on their pages. I marked one or two of their essays like this as well and it gave them something to work on. It helped me focus in on their difficulties if I used the same colour many times for one student. After I got used to it, it didn't seem to take much extra time. It seemed a "softer" way to correct and the students didn't seem to mind it as much and took more notice of their errors.
I think it would work well with Systemic Functional Grammar as well and give the grid that they use to divide up sentences a bit more of a distinction to the eye.