The brilliance of the cuisinaire rods is they are accurate and so the way they fit together was immensly pleasing to me when I was little.
The smallest one is a cube, then a red rod exactly two cubes.
I loved the cuisinaire rods I had as a child, the colours were harmonious and I can still count in that spectrum.
None of my other blocks made patterns as well, they were just innacurate and at a certain age I loved patterns & ziggurats.
They were my absolute favourite building blocks and perhaps helped me become numerate, I certainly knew how many red blocks matched a green and understood add, multiply, & divide operations with coloured blocks intuitively before I knew number symbols.
I think the only change I would try is to add the base 10 number symbols to each one which might make the transition to symbols easier ( maybe put binary notation on the other side* ;)
*[ my dad was a programmer so I learned binary, octal and hex counting as well as base 10 ]
I didn't have the numbered track that seems really cool but there was a very long one in my box, longer than 36 units, maybe it was 100, can't remember, was less fun than the coloured ones.
That the numbers on the track are not coloured according to the blocks seems odd, it is not quite as pretty as the blocks. Perhaps putting symbols on the blocks would make them less appealing to the infant mind ?
The smallest one is a cube, then a red rod exactly two cubes.
I loved the cuisinaire rods I had as a child, the colours were harmonious and I can still count in that spectrum.
None of my other blocks made patterns as well, they were just innacurate and at a certain age I loved patterns & ziggurats.
They were my absolute favourite building blocks and perhaps helped me become numerate, I certainly knew how many red blocks matched a green and understood add, multiply, & divide operations with coloured blocks intuitively before I knew number symbols.
I think the only change I would try is to add the base 10 number symbols to each one which might make the transition to symbols easier ( maybe put binary notation on the other side* ;)
*[ my dad was a programmer so I learned binary, octal and hex counting as well as base 10 ]
I didn't have the numbered track that seems really cool but there was a very long one in my box, longer than 36 units, maybe it was 100, can't remember, was less fun than the coloured ones.
That the numbers on the track are not coloured according to the blocks seems odd, it is not quite as pretty as the blocks. Perhaps putting symbols on the blocks would make them less appealing to the infant mind ?