The Math Learning Center Blog

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. This year, Bridges educators are adapting instruction to unique situations and varied circumstances. While some Bridges educators are teaching in person (with safety protocols in place) or 100% remotely, many...

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...

Editor's note: 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. Educators share with us that one of the aspects of the Bridges classroom they miss the most this year is their turn-and-talk routine. Teachers wish they could hear the voices of their students...

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...

Physical manipulatives are locked away in classrooms, so teachers, students, and families are turning to The Math Learning Center apps to support understanding of visual mathematics in a remote learning environment. Usage of these free virtual manipulatives and models has tripled over the last six weeks. On Friday, May 1, more than 500 educators attended an MLC webinar on how the apps can be used...

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 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...

The new and improved Free Products page in our online catalog features a fresh look, new category descriptions, and additional products. The newly created Lessons & Activities categories contain over 150 individual Bridges supplement sets as well as grade level correlations to the Common Core State Standards. These teacher materials and worksheets that can be used with any curriculum. In addition...