The Math Learning Center Blog

The number rack helps build the bridge from counting to computational fluency by inviting students to think about numbers in groups of 2, 5, and 10. Its 2 rows of 5 red and 5 white movable beads allow students to see and slide beads in groups rather than 1 by 1. Just as we want students to move from sounding out words letter by letter to reading morphemes and whole words, we want students to move...

Now more than ever, families are looking for ways to support their students’ mathematics education. They may not know where to start—the Bridges in Mathematics approach might appear a bit different from the way they were taught math. How can Bridges educators offer families a chance to see what a Bridges classroom looks like? How can they offer ideas and options for fostering their students’ math...

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...

In this series of blog posts, we highlight educators in the field who are using remote learning resources intentionally to build classroom community, collaboration, and student sense-making. Bridges educators strive to develop safe learning environments that foster inclusivity and collaboration. This environment creates a space for students to develop a sense of belonging and engage in learning...

In a remote environment, how can Bridges educators provide appropriate scaffolds and be responsive to student thinking? Sharing MLC apps with students can be a powerful approach, particularly when working with students in an asynchronous setting. What does it mean to share with an MLC app? Put simply, Bridges educators can build a “saved state” task that they share with their students by way of an...

Although there are no specific lessons in Bridges that address the 100th day of school, it is a big day in kindergarten. After all, during Number Corner we’ve been counting the days of school every day since the first one! Students have been adding chain links and stickers to ten-frames, figuring out how many more days to the next 10, and problem solving “How many more days until we are halfway to...

The 3Rs—Reading, wRiting, and aRithmetic—have been foundational in education for thousands of years. My recent book, The Fourth R , adds to that list Reasoning/computational thinking. It concerns using human brains and computer brains, individually and working together, to solve problems and accomplish thoughts. Like each of the traditional 3Rs, computational thinking is both a discipline of study...

Children need lots of practice, with various activities in different settings, to develop a strong sense of number. My kindergartners love an activity I call Estimation Bag. I place a small plastic container inside a canvas bag, and a student adds a single type of object: paperclips, pennies, barrettes, etc. We start with 10 or fewer and increase the quantity to between 10 and 20 after a month or...

The Number Pieces app is an excellent tool for teaching and learning place value. Here are a few activities that you can use with kids in grades 1–2. These activities explore base ten concepts and models within 1,000 that will help lay the foundation for learning double-digit computation. Activity 1: Ask the child to show a certain number using the base ten pieces. For example, 3 tens, 7 ones, and...

The array model, used throughout Bridges, is the subject of “Arrays, Multiplication and Division” by Jennie Pennant from nrich.maths.org. The piece outlines how the array model supports development of a sense of multiplicative relationships and describes how to move students from building multiplication facts and tables to exploring division as the inverse operation of multiplication. The author...