The power of conversation

We use a lot of different resources (hence this blog!) in our everyday life and learning journey but today, as I was driving with the boys to a science park (and Reuben was chatting away, trying to make sense of how rainbows are made), I realised that probably the most important thing of all is all the talking we do, all the trying to make sense of things. Sometimes I know the answers and sometimes I don't but it is when we talk things through that the boys vocalise their thoughts, pull things together, realise when something doesn't make sense, ask more questions, we might then search for things in Google and talk some more, experiment and still talk some more. It's a real conversation, not an adult imparting knowledge on a child, I feel.

I enjoy this process enormously but it also makes me quite sad for the child I was, my experience of being in school meant that I was silenced for all the hours I was there (and at home too as homework could not be questioned either), there were no conversations, no trying to make sense of things together, just a dumb acceptance of what the teachers said and unpleasant consequences if any questioning did arise (I still remember refusing to kill any insects for a science project... my teachers weren't happy...).
I often look at the boys and all the joy they get out of learning and think about how important human relationships and respectful communication are to the acquisition of real, long-lasting knowledge, the power of conversation indeed!

Cuisenaire Rods

I used the rods in primary school in Italy while learning Maths and I was really fond of them, they made numbers come alive and using them for homework was something I actually looked forward to. We used them for basic operations and fractions, I also remember them making a reappearance for algebra years later, as well as finding they are used in language teaching to symbolise the different elements of a sentence.

They were created by a Belgian primary school teacher, Georges Cuisenaire, but were made popular by the educator Caleb Gattegno in the 1950s. John Holt saw Gattegno in action and used the rods himself extensively (although he found that using them in the prescribed way did not really help his "problem" students understand numbers any better...).

These are the ones we have, but the wooden version

So what are they? Ten coloured rods each representing a number, so 1 is the white cube, 2 is the red rod as long as 2 whites, and so on. If you have a structured approach, there are many many manuals and ideas on how to use them (the rods we bought came with a list of activities). If, like us, you are autonomous, the rods can just be left on a table or a shelf for the children to pick up and make sense of, my two year old makes very long rows of them or likes to sort them into colour/length.
Another way we use them is when my eldest is trying to work something out and gets stuck, if he asks for help we get the rods out and work out the problem "hands on".
For example: he was trying to do some sums on the ipad today and was having trouble so we pulled out the white (number 1) cubes, 9-3=6 suddenly became much clearer (line up nine white cubes and take three away, how many are left?) and the next step will be to replace the nine white cubes with one black one which is just as long (the 9 rod), use the 3 rod and the 6 rod to show the result without having to count the units one by one.

More Maths ideas