Bridges Blog Archive for Problem Solving

Looking for ways to explore relationships between circumference, radius, diameter and area? Check out The Circle Tool from NCTM Illuminations. You’ll notice three buttons that run along the top of the game window: Intro, Investigation and Problems. With the Intro button selected, you’ll notice an icon of a video camera.

In September, Shelly Scheafer shared First Grade Word Problems that she wrote to align with Common Core State Standards. In a follow-up she writes:

Over the past year, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics released five free mobile apps. I spent a few hours investigating Pick-a-Path with a fourth grader who found it mesmerizing; we used it as an opportunity to practice mental math.

Every year the NRICH site from the University of Cambridge publishes an online holiday calendar containing a daily math challenge for December 1-24. A few activities require a partner and dice, but most are problem solving questions that could be used by a single child up to a large group.

Visitors to Noelle Clark's third grade classroom were understandably excited to hear a student's mathematical thinking during a game of "Anything But Five," in Unit 2: Session 24. The addends the students spun in the game were 6 + 8 + 9 + 6. The student said, "I know there are fives in all those numbers. I added 5, 5, 5, 5 to make 20. Then I added what was left. 1, 3, 4, 1 to make 9. 20 + 9 = 29."

I've been working with an extremely diverse group of learners, looking at the 4th Grade October Number Corner Calendar Grid. At the beginning of the month one experienced Bridges student detected a pattern, labeling it "base 4." Another child was unable to detect any patterns; even when asked to pair-share, the child couldn't come up with an idea on what the next day might look like.

Shelly Scheafer, first grade teacher from Bend, Oregon, shares an idea for Unit 1 story problems. She writes:

The first grade Bridges curriculum provides many opportunities for students to solve and write story problems on their own. Beginning in Unit 1, students act out bug problems and use plastic bug manipulatives for telling and solving problems.