Cuisenaire rods

According to Gattegno, "Georges Cuisenaire showed in the early 1950s that pupils who had been taught traditionally, and were rated 'weak', took huge strides when they shifted to using the material.

At this point he had already founded the International Commission for the Study and Improvement of Mathematics Education (CIEAEM)[6] and the Association of Teachers of Mathematics, but this marked a turning point in his understanding: Then, Cuisenaire took us to a table in one corner of the room where pupils were standing round a pile of colored sticks and doing sums which seemed to me to be unusually hard for children of that age.

After listening to Cuisenaire asking his first and second grade pupils questions and hearing their answers immediately and with complete self-assurance and accuracy, the excitement then turned into irrepressible enthusiasm and a sense of illumination.

Seeing that the rods allowed pupils "to expand on their latent mathematical abilities in a creative and enjoyable fashion", Gattegno's pedagogy shifted radically as he began to stand back and allow pupils to take a leading role: Cuisenaire's gift of the rods led me to teach by non-interference making it necessary to watch and listen for the signs of truth that are made, but rarely recognized.

[7]While the material has found an important place in myriad teacher-centered lessons, Gattegno's student-centered practice also inspired a number of educators.

"[8]John Holt, in his 1964 How Children Fail, wrote: This work has changed most of my ideas about the way to use Cuisenaire rods and other materials.

What we ought to do is use these materials to enable children to make for themselves, out of their own experience and discoveries, a solid and growing understanding of the ways in which numbers and the operations of arithmetic work.

Tony Wing, in producing resources for Numicon, built on many of Stern's ideas, also making trays and tracks available for use with Cuisenaire rods.

[19] The aesthetic and numerically comprehensive Colour Factor system was marketed for some years by Seton Pollock's family, before being conveyed to the educational publishing house Edward Arnold.