Educational Publisher Marks 75th Anniversary of Popular Math Manipulative
Cuisenaire® Rods and their continued impact on math instruction to be celebrated at
NCTM Annual Meeting & Exposition, St. Louis MO
VERNON HILLS, IL— May 15, 2006— ETA hand2mind ® announced today that it will launch a year-long celebration of the 75th anniversary of Cuisenaire Rods® at the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics Annual Meeting and Exposition in St. Louis, April 26-29, 2006. The celebration will feature a commemorative book and special anniversary set of the colored rods available to math educators visiting the ETA hand2mind booth.
Cuisenaire Rods—a series of wooden rods measuring 1 cm to 10 cm, with each length designated by a specific color—were invented by Belgian educator Georges Cuisenaire in 1931 and gained worldwide recognition with the 1952 publication of Numbers and Colors (Les Nombres en Couleurs), a book outlining how to use the rods to facilitate active, student-centered learning. Introduced to American educators by The Cuisenaire Company of America in the 1950’s, Cuisenaire Rods were used in schools and teacher colleges in the decades following and gained wider recognition when they were included in the 1983 Texas textbook adoption.
Developed as a "keyboard" of numbers representing the mathematical intervals between musical notes, Cuisenaire Rods, manufactured in plastic as well as wood and featured in dozens of resource books and K-12 programs, are used to help students visualize numbers and understand their relationship to one another; to bridge understanding from the concrete to the abstract.
"As we celebrate this milestone, it is easy to see why this simple set of colored rods has survived the test of time," says Dennis Goldman, president of ETA hand2mind , the company who bought Cuisenaire Company of America in 2000. "This concept has impacted generations of students, and I think we will find Cuisenaire Rods as relevant 75 years from now."
New resources such as the full-color illustrated Hands-On Standards, Deluxe Edition books for Grades PreK-4 recently published by ETA hand2mind , continue to be developed to help new generations of educators introduce manipulatives into their instruction.
Hands-On Standards, Deluxe Edition and a wide variety of Cuisenaire Rods products will be on display in the ETA hand2mind booth, #2519, at the NCTM Annual Meeting. Sample lessons from the books are also available at www.etacuisenaire.com.
About ETA hand2mind
Headquartered in Vernon Hills, IL, ETA hand2mind is recognized as the premier publisher and pioneer of manipulatives-based education, with more than 8,000 supplemental math, reading, and science resources. Aligned to state and national standards, these products offer hands-on educational opportunities that engage students in learning and make teaching more effective for educators.
Londa Della 800-445-5985, ext. 5219
