The units are color-coded which provides additional visual cues for children. If you look carefully at the above photo, you can see that the units of 1 are white and the units of 2 are red, units 3 are green and so on.  When using them with children, you can refer to the lengths by their unit number as well as their color.

Unlike Unifix cubes, traditional Cuisenaire ® Rods do not attach to one another (although there are sets that do attach).  This provides a different set of possibilities for children as their uses may be less obvious and may require a bit more ingenuity.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the “trading game” that is played with the family bear counters. Well, a more developed “trading game” can be played with the rods since each of the rods has a specific value.  White is worth 1 and red is worth 2 and green is worth 3.  In order to get a green rod, children must trade 3 whites, or 1 white and 1 red.  Give this a try and tell us what you think.

There are few manipulatives out there that are as interesting and beautiful as a wooden set of Cuisenaire® Rods.  Developed 75 years ago by Belgian teacher Georges Cuisenaire these “rods” come in beautiful colors in varying lengths.

Using Cuisenaire® Rods to compare length is as simple as putting shorter rods next to longer rods and seeing how your children observe those differences.  Although these manipulatives were designed for a very specific purpose (units of 1, 2, 3, etc.) I think  it is far more likely that children will explore the rods by laying them out, standing them up, and comparing them.

Most young children will be able to identify which rods are shorter and which are longer, especially when they are laid out next to each other.  It is far more difficult for children to compare several rods of differing lengths simultaneously.  Putting many of them in order from shortest to longest is really challenging because it asks children to think about 2 things at the same time; which rod is shorter than these – but longer than the others?

If you look carefully at the above photo, you can see that the units of 1 are white and the units of 2 are red, 3 are green and so on.  They provide a visual representation of number units, up to 10, or for today’s purposes shortest to longest.

Work with numbers 11-19 to gain foundations for place value.

• CCSS.Math.Content.K.NBT.A.1 Compose and decompose numbers from 11 to 19 into ten ones and some further ones, e.g., by using objects or drawings, and record each composition or decomposition by a drawing or equation (such as 18 = 10 + 8); understand that these numbers are composed of ten ones and one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, or nine ones.

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If you are not a math person, haven’t studied math in many years, or have any amount of “math fear” the words BASE TEN may be one of those things that make you sweat and tremble.  In general, I would venture to guess that many of us have heard about Base Ten, but have little to no idea what it really means.

Base Ten is the number system that we commonly use that describes the place of each number (ones, tens, hundreds, thousands, etc.).

Take a look at a number like  4,352

The 2 is in the one’s place, the 5 is in the ten’s place, the 3 is in the hundred’s place and the 4 is in the thousand’s place.  Each of those number is 10 times the value to the right of it (thus the idea of Base Ten- each place increases by a multiple of 10).

One of the common ways that teachers are currently teaching Base Ten is by introducing Base Ten Blocks like those below.

For the most part, I think these manipulatives are too sophisticated for pre-k children but they will be introduced to these in kindergarten and will probably use them quite extensively.

If I remember correctly, ones are called “bits”, tens are called “rods”, hundreds are called “flats” and thousands are called “blocks”.  Children begin to create a “rod” by putting 10 bits together, a “flat” by putting 10 rods together and so on.  There are all sorts of interesting and innovative ways teachers are incorporating these into their math teaching.

How can we support the early concepts associated with Base Ten for younger children? The best way we prepare children to understand place value is to reinforce counting, cardinality, ordinality, and one-to-one correspondence.  There are better manipulatives for younger children (Unifix cubes, and Cuisenaire Rods, for instance) that can reinforce these concepts through exploration and play.