Rods

Remember Cuisenaire Rods? Little wooden rods, named as if they should be a kitchen implement but actually designed to help small children learn the basics of arithmetic. Each colour of rod represents a number, and they are in centimetres that number in length. Thus, you can visually see that two green (number 2) rods are the same length combined as a single purple (number 4) rod. And so on.

I vaguely remember these from when I was a child. I have no idea if they are still used in British schools. My older brother has clear and fond memories of them from his childhood so, a few months ago, he gave a set to our son. Today, for the first time, he got them out to play with. And, as you can see, he was less impressed by their mathematical properties than by their engineering potential. He has spent more or less the entire day building Cuisenaire bridges.

Otherwise, it's been a quiet day. I took the boy to the supermarket to do some shopping. He's been angelically well behaved the entire day, making up very much for yesterday. It helped that we've had no workmen in the house all day. Mrs O headed off to London this afternoon for her usual fortnightly trip to the office - she'll be back Thursday night.

We've decided definitely to go ahead with the trip to Kent. We'll head off on Monday after leaving instructions for the carpenter, and come back two weeks later - hopefully to a pretty much finished house.