Cuisenaire Rods to Teach English

How to Use Cuisenaire Rods to Teach English

Cuisenaire Rods are a set of colored rods usually of 1 centimeter cross section and of 10 lengths from 1 to 10 centimeters that are used for teaching number concepts and the basic operations of arithmetic

Colour	Common abbreviation	Length (in centimetres)
White	w	1
Red	r	2
Light green	g	3
Purple (or pink)	p	4
Yellow	y	5
Dark green	d	6
Black	b	7
Brown (or “tan”)	t	8
Blue	B	9
Orange	O	10

Cuisenaire Rods in the Language Classroom

Though primarily used for mathematics, they have also become popular in language-teaching classrooms.

They can be used to:

• Demonstrate most grammatical structures such as prepositions of place, comparatives & superlatives, determiners, tenses, adverbs of time, manner, etc.

• Show sentence and word stress, rising and falling intonation and word groupings

• Create a visual model of constructs, for example the English verb tense system .

Interested in Learning More?

These are some articles about the topic that you should check out

• donaldecherry’s channel   on  Youtube.com
• Using Cuisenaire rods with young learners on OneStopEnglish.com
• Cuisenaire rods in the language classroom on teachingenglish.org.uk
• Silent Way on teachingenglish.org.uk
• Silent Way on donaldcherry.com
• Holistic grammar with Cuisenaire rods on ilovetefl.wordpress.com
• Cuisenaire Rods on sandymillin.wordpress.com

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