Oh wow! Cuisenaire rods are both esoteric, and something I have seen used as an amazing teaching tool.

How do you get 5 and 6 year olds to go from playing with Cuisenaire rods as blocks to modeling algebraic equations and learning fractions?

The teacher, Simon Gregg, instructs us. He began a running Twitter thread for his 2016-2017 school year where you can follow his students' journey.

You see him first giving students cuisenaire rods for free play, then over a period of time getting them to create "100" faces, e.g. a representation of a face that had the equivalent of 100 blocks.

By the end of the year the students had not only modeled algebraic equations, but it had given Mr. Gregg an entry point to teaching the students (5 and 6 year olds!) algebraic notation. LOTS was learned in the interim.

It should be a case study in pedagogy.

Mind you, Cuisenaire rods are just the tool. The teacher is who helped make them amazing.

Some links to Simon Gregg's work. (BTW, he teaches in France and when he refers to 'K3' that's the equivalent of kindergarten in the U.S.)

An end of year reflection: http://followinglearning.blogspot.com/2017/07/looking-back-l...

Cardinality, ordinality and developments with the Cuisenaire rods in K3: http://followinglearning.blogspot.com/2017/01/

Compendium of his tweets chronicling the use of Cuisenaire rods in his classroom: https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&vertical=default&q=cuise...