Learning ResourcesCuisenaire Rods Plastic Introductory Set

What a pity I didn't read the reviews for this item. I foolishly assumed that the illustration showed what I was buying. I'm not quibbling about the quantity of rods in the box, after all it is not an expensive set but as another reviewer wrote 'it's not a box with partitions. its just an open plastic tray'. From some years teaching I know that sorting the rods into the appropriate partitions is a great help for children's understanding of the relationship to the numbers. They can see the different sizes easily and soon learn which numbers they correspond to. Unfortunately a jumble of rods doesn't really help.

I already have one set of these but needed another to increase the number of red 2 and yellow 5 rods. It would be useful to be able to buy books of detailed activities, such as how to multiply or divide with large numbers, as I know that you can do quite advanced maths tasks with Cuisenaire rods, once you know how! These rods are good quality and I may even buy some more!

Cheap packaging, cheap extruded plastic from a cheap mould so that the sides are bowed, alignment suffers as a result, which matters if you are showing the children multiplication, square roots etc. Plastic rods made by Cuisenaire are much more accurately made and have a nice weight to them making it easier for the child to distinguish between them by touch.

This is a versatile set of Cuisenaire Rods, in a good selection of lengths and bright colours. Cuisenaire rods have various functions in teaching and learning. They are of course good for visualising arithmetic. But they can also be used in language teaching, to represent syllables and stresses. This is a sturdy set that should prove pretty indestructable.

The rods don't come in the neat convenient packaging pictured, so they are a bit difficult to tidy away, but they are a great item for helping struggling students develop visual numeracy skills. As these rods vary so much in price, the cost of this unit wasn't as high as at other outlets