Where this tool comes from· Cuisenaire (1952); Cuisenaire & Gattegno (1954)
Cuisenaire rods
Georges Cuisenaire, a primary-school teacher in Thuin, Belgium, made a set of coloured wooden rods for his pupils and described them in his booklet Les nombres en couleurs (1952). Caleb Gattegno met him in 1953 and took the rods to schools around the world.
One thing to hold: Rods in ten lengths, 1 to 10 centimetres, each length its own colour: white is 1, red 2, light green 3, and orange is 10.
Why it matters: Any rod can be the whole. Call the orange rod 1 and the red rod is 1/5; call the purple rod 1 and the same red rod is 1/2. The fraction depends on which rod you choose as the whole, which is the idea this activity is about.
What we don’t know: How much the rods themselves help, compared with other materials, is still argued about. It depends a lot on how they are used.
In the teacher’s words:
The subordination of teaching to learning.
When you worked out which rod was the whole, did anyone tell you the answer? What helped you find it?
Dates:
- 1952 Cuisenaire publishes Les nombres en couleurs.
- 1954 Cuisenaire and Gattegno publish Numbers in Colour in English.
- 1963 Gattegno describes the Silent Way, a way of teaching built on the learner finding things out.