PDL's Math Stories Adventures with Cuisenaire Rods

Math adventures with Cuisenaire Rods offer students a divergent opportunity to explore and build numbers using a variety of constraints through limited operations and limited numbers/rods.

Divergent opportunities tap into the naturally creative abilities of children and make math a fun world of exploration and creativity. With 40 unique storylines and constraints, the opportunities are endless. The teacher chooses what number, equation or operation to focus on for the worksheet.

These come as task cards and journal pages. They are designed to be reused over and over:

Instructions:

Print and laminate if desired. Use a dry erase marker (if laminating) to enter a value in the box. Each story is constrained by the rods pictured. The student can use any number of the rods pictured in the task card or you can choose to constrain the child to a few.

Literal Work:

Values can be rods, a composition of rods or relationships between rods. For example, you choose the task card with the rods red, purple and yellow and you want them to build rods that exhibit the value of blue. The student can show the sum of purple and yellow, the difference between the 2 (p + y) – (p + y), 8 ( r ) – (y +p), or ½ of (2y + 2p) = b Solutions are as endless as one’s imagination.

You can also have them build a fraction value that expresses one half of any length of their choice.

Number Study

If you are working in number studies, enter the value of any number you are studying.

This series is designed to complement Gattegno Textbook 1.