VERNON HILLS, IL— May 15, 2006— ETA/Cuisenaire® 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/Cuisenaire 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/Cuisenaire, 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/Cuisenaire,
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/Cuisenaire
booth, #2519, at the NCTM Annual Meeting. Sample lessons from the books are
also available at www.etacuisenaire.com.
About ETA/Cuisenaire
ETA/Cuisenaireis recognized as the premier publisher and pioneer of Interactive
Literacy and manipulatives-based education, with more than 8,000 supplemental
reading, math, and science resources. Aligned to state and national standards,
these products offer hands-on educational opportunities that make learning
fun for students and teaching more effective for educators. For
more information, visit www.etacuisenaire.com or
call 800-445-5985.
For more information, press only:
Londa Della 800-445-5985, ext. 5219,
©2006 ETA/Cuisenaire. All rights reserved. Reading Rods® is
a trademark or U.S. registered trademarks of ETA/Cuisenaire. The names of actual
companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective
owners.
