How have you used cuisenaire rods in the classroom? Do you find them useful or do you think they are of limited value?

Tric, New Zealand
I have used CRs with beginning readers and writers - to teach 1:1 in reading of text. At sentence level each rod represents a word with spacing betwn the rods: Reading and writing Left to Right and Return Sweep on continuous text. In creating written text the student first orally forms and retells the sentence - then for each word articulated a CR is placed on the page with spacing betwn. Then the student repeats the sentence pointing 1:1 at the CRs. The teacher records the written text above the CRs. Next the student may point either to the word or the CR when rereading the sentence. Follow by another step in in their learning is to remove the support that the CRs give and the student rereads the text by pointing to the words only. Variations on this process is used with and by the students eg the student moves through this process with the teacher; the student creates their own sentence using the rods without tcher support and brings the tcher in when they have reached thier 'zone of proximal development' (Vygotsky) Scaffolded learning is given by the teacher who removes their degree of support when the student demonstrates fluency and independence in the scaffolded learning process which is occurring for them.

Armano Grande
Among other applications, Cuisenaire rods are great for helping kids understand the physical aspect of numbers: why six is three times two or why ten is more than three times three.

Ken MacDougall, Scotland
The rods are very useful in class. I think it's a good idea to have them with you all the time. Just last week a student took the rods from me to explain how a car accident had happened. The plastic ones are horrible.

Eliana, Brazil
I use them all the time. They are useful as a means for students to visualise structures in teaching grammar and pronunciation to use as a visual aid to create images for narratives.

Dave, UK
This is fascinating. Of course fancy methods for fancy methods' sake is pointless, but reading responses here, it seems that, when in their proper place, CRs can really aid learning. I shall be investigating them before heading off to Poland!

Nusrat Jahan, Pakistan
I think that using cuisenaire rods will make the lesson interesting and easy for both teachers and students

Alastair, Czech Republic
If your students like being paired up with different partners during a lesson so that they're not always working with the same partner, the rods are excellent. If you go round the class giving each student a number, letter, animal name or whatever and then ask them to find the person with the same number, letter or animal, you'll invariably get students who forget what their number, etc is. If you give students different coloured rods in turn around the class, e.g. red, yellow, blue, green, red, yellow, blue, green and then ask them to find the person with the same colour and sit down with them as their new partner, it's perfectly clear who their new partner is as they have the Cuisenaire rods in their hands for all to see. So simple and yet so effective.

Simon, UAE
Love Cuisinere rods - wish I had more good ideas.

Charles Clennell ; working in Malaysia
I have the original wooden Cuisenaire rods in their red plastic box made in Reading UK - every piece still intact! I have used them over the years in my teacher training programs to demonstrate specific phonological, lexical, grammatical items eg word stress can be shown v effectively on polysyllabic words like umBRELla by using small rods for unstressed syllables and large red ones for stressed syllables. They are excellent too for definite/indefinte article training (Show me A pink rod, Show me THE pink rod etc). I also use them for pronunciation with my Malaysian teachers, who have difficulty articulating final consonants eg"Three pink sticks"

Bob Lejkowski-Clark
I have used cuisenaire rods on a few occasions and also attented a talk on the use of them and I feel that they are another useful tool in the armoury of a teacher of language. To the other teachers who have written I would suggest that you have a look [on the internet] to purchase the rods and find activities and ideas. I am fairly certain that they are on a french site for language teaching.

Liliana, Argentina
I know that they are particularly useful when teaching kindergarten children.

Elisabeth Emmott
I use the rods all the time, every lesson for teaching beginner ESOL and Entry 1 students (both adults and young learners) in the UK. Some of the learners are literate in their own language, some learners aren't literate in any language. The rods are brilliant. I use them to show learners the number of words in a sentence, help them with word boundaries, contracted forms, prepositions, substitution drills and the list goes on and on. The students use them to build their sentences, touching each rod as they say the words. Beginner learners who are unable to produce fluent and accurate sentences during conventional drilling are transformed by using cuisenaire rods. I've used them with higher level students too with good results. They seem to connect with lots of different learning styles.

Maria Fucci, Italy
Of course I use C.R.! I've been using them since I started teaching. I always take them with me ready to help me while teaching prepostitions, comparative forms, word order, saxon genitive.... and, why not, to telling stories! My students enjoy them. You just need imagination to prepare activities, realism to use them and a great desire to make your high school students enjoy learning English!

Ethna, Australia
I think the rods used to be used to teach reading to young children? I would like to know the value of using them to teach English.

N.v.Tilborg, Belgium
C.Rods was an 'invention' by a belgian (primary) school teacher. He made ten coloured pieces of wood, each one with a different size, to visualise the relation between the numbers (e.g. two reds are as long as a brown one. So if you suggest that a red one is equal to three, the brown one is equal to six). In the beginning, mister Cuisenaire used his rods during his math classes. These days, you can find the rods almost everywhere. I myself (I'm a language trainer) I use the rods to visualise the structure of a sentence (red is a verb, green is the subject....), to explain the structure of regular verbs or to show my students how to put the accent in a word. My students (mostly adults) appreciate this way of teaching/explaining the dutch grammar.

Raymond Kerr, Portugal
The most useful tool at all levels. Adults seem to like them more than YLs!

S.Y. Tupper, India.
Though I've never used cuisenaire rods while teaching I can strongly suggest that using them to teach small children is of great value.

Jean Stocker, Germany
I think the days are gone when we use all kinds of fancy tools to teach. Learners need a clear explanation, but they also need time to observe, notice, hypothesise, practise and eventually internalise. Maybe we should be encouraging learners themselves to develop some tricks to help them learn.

Rosa, Spain
I find them quite useful, but I haven´t been able to buy them in Madrid...

Liliana, Colombia
I would like to know what are cuisenaire rods, how can I use them and where can I find them. Thanks