Bridges Blog Archive for Special Education

Justin Johnson and a team of colleagues from Oregon's Portland Public Schools have developed valuable resources that support academic language development in Bridges. Math TOSA Bonnie Robb writes that as students play partner games during Work Places, "We want students to use mathematical language to explain what they are learning during the game." To that end, the team wrote sentence frames "to support 'math talk' during Work Places.

Marie Smerigan, the K-12 Math Coordinator in Farmington, Michigan Public Schools, submitted a document she created for the alignment of Work Places. The document (pdf) includes:

This week our school superintendent made an interesting comment as he talked about school funding issues. He mentioned how a parent had approached him and said, "With the cutback of days in school, I should really be doing more with my student at home, shouldn't I?" Undoubtedly, most parents want to help their children succeed in school. What tools can we, as educators, give them?

Parents Can Nurture Critical Thinking

On the November Calendar Grid, "The Tumbling Triangle," fourth graders develop language and concepts of motion geometry as a triangle translates, rotates, and reflects on a quadrant grid. As the month winds up, students may enjoy this interactive game emphasizing geometric transformations. The cartoon host invites players to move shapes in a sequence of steps intended to review translation, rotation, and reflection.

Ten frames serve as a key visual model in kindergarten and first grade, allowing children to count objects in an organized way. Illuminations, a National Council of Teachers of Mathematics website, offers several ten frame games giving students practice in counting and addition.

As you know, Bridges in Mathematics advocates building a safe, positive community of learners in every classroom. Students are more apt to share their thinking, listen carefully to others, disagree with an idea not a person, and collaborate in positive and productive ways when they feel part of something bigger than themselves that they view as beneficial and good. Jefferson County Public Schools has taken buillding learning communities to a different level as described in a recent Edutopia article at www.edutopia.org/louisville-sel-social-emotional-learning.