Bridges Blog Archive for First Year

Blog guest, Alison Fox Mazzola, is a Math Specialist leading her school through the first year of Bridges at St. Matthew's Episcopal Day School in San Mateo, California. Here she reflects on first year implementation in an independent setting. [Photos are from her school.]

Question: How did you first introduce Bridges?

Teaching fourth grade Bridges? As your year gets underway, consider the value in teaching and reviewing multiplication strategies from third grade, based on the distributive and associative properties for multiplication. If you or your students are new to Bridges, you may be learning strategies together for the first time. Strategies like "double plus 1 set" and "clock facts" are reviewed in Unit 1, Sessions 13 and 15.

Mary Harbolt knows how to manage student manipulatives. She teaches a 4th/5th blend at Faubion Elementary in Portland, Oregon, and wrote in with this fabulous idea...

I have a marble system in my classroom. [Students work together to earn--and sometimes lose--marbles that can earn them special privileges and/or rewards.]

If a math manipulative hits the floor and I pick it up, it's my marble. If a student picks it up first, no marble is lost. This system makes the students hypervigilant. At the end, if all manipulatives are put away, they get a marble.

Hello all. You’ve probably read the Number Corner entry already. I’m happy to be your long distance consultant, continuing for some of you and new to the rest.