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The Math Learning Center Blog

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It’s spring! The sun is shining, plants are growing, and frogs and bugs abound. At The Math Learning Center, we’ve created some fun activities with springtime themes to help get your math blooming! Like February’s popular Share the Math Love celebration, each of the following activities includes the Share Your Work feature. You can send students a link or code to access the activity, and students...
Kim Markworth, Director of Content Development
Within the math education community, a lot of confusion surrounds the word fluency . Yet Common Core State Standards call for fluency at each grade level. Grades 2 and 3 standards specify that students know a standard “from memory,” phrasing which may further cloud our concept of fluency. In the Ignite Talk “There IS a Difference,” K-5 math educator Graham Fletcher explains the subtle yet powerful...
Cynthia Hockman-Chupp
At MLC, we’ve put our hearts into supporting teachers in various ways throughout this school year. One of our most popular offerings, for Bridges and non-Bridges educators, is our collection of Free Math Apps , based on the visual models featured in Bridges in Mathematics. In December 2020, the number of visits to MLC’s Math Apps were more than ten times higher than visits in December 2019. If...
Kim Markworth, Director of Content Development
The 100th day of school is nigh! This point in the school year is significant for its place value importance, but it also indicates that the school year is more than half over. It is an exciting milestone for children, sometimes a relief for teachers, and a reason to celebrate for all. At MLC, the past few months have given us our own reason to celebrate the growing popularity of our free math...
Kim Markworth, Director of Content Development
The hundreds chart is an amazing tool for counting, skip counting, adding, subtracting, multiplying, exploring patterns, investigating place value, problem solving, and more. The standard hundreds chart – with 10 rows of 10 and starting with 1 in the upper left corner – has been used in elementary classrooms for decades to allow for these very opportunities. In more recent years, charts of...
Patrick Vennebush, Chief Learning Officer
Kim Markworth, Director of Content Development
Now that all MLC Math Apps have sharing capabilities, we’ve launched an App Activities page on the newly redesigned MLC website. There, teachers can find a repository of app-based problem-solving tasks to engage and challenge students. You can search by keyword or filter by grade level, topic, or app to find an appropriate problem-solving task for your students. While I encourage you to explore...
Kim Markworth, Director of Content Development
The start of a new school year is the perfect time for teachers to get to know their students as mathematicians. Exploring students' math identities means paying attention to their beliefs about what it means to be “good at math” and their perceptions of their own ability to do mathematics. We want to share some of the possibilities within the Bridges curriculum that will help teachers know their...
Annelly Rodas
Nataki McClain
SEG Measurement, an independent third-party research firm, recently conducted a study of the effectiveness of Bridges in Mathematics using data from the 2015–16 and 2016–17 school years. Approximately 1,000 students from over 40 classrooms participated in the study. Students who used Bridges were statistically matched with students using another elementary mathematics curriculum in a different...
Collin Nelson
We’ve all been through it before. We spend months teaching our students mathematical content and over time, we start to see them making progress. And then all of a sudden winter break sneaks up, seemingly out of nowhere. And when our students return two weeks later, we find it’s stressful to review concepts that we thought were secure, especially knowing that there’s new content to cover. This is...
Our curriculum specialists recently attended a workshop with Jo Boaler, Cathy Williams, and their youcubed team. We left energized by three key messages and affirmed by recognizing how The Math Learning Center addresses them. Math is visual The Math Learning Center grew out of a project funded by the National Science Foundation to improve the teaching of mathematics. Our founders developed a...
Pia Hansen