Building Bridges To Connect Prior Knowledge

Hi All, 

I had a chance to be a “new learner” this summer! I am learning how to play Ukulele.  I play violin, so when I learned how to play mandolin it was easy - the same strings and the same fingering.  Ukulele has different strings and fingering and it took awhile to get my fingers to make new shapes. What made the most difference for me was finding a note chart that I could use to play scales. That one piece of information helped bridge what I already knew with what I was learning.  At the beginning of the year, it is important to find those bridges for all the learners in your room. Here are some resources that might make bridge building easier!

• ELL Supports For Writing and Discussions From Achievethecore.org
• Making Math Visible - Interactive Modeling Tools K-12 From Illuminations (NCTM)
• The Painted Essay - Making Writing Visible  From the Vermont Writing Collaborative
• Draft Ohio Model Curriculum - Science, The Nature of Science, Content Elaboration for ODE Science - take time to read through this and make comments by Sept 28….get some great resource ideas and progression of learning connections in the process!
• Draft Ohio Model Curriculum - Social Studies  and Draft Ohio Model Curriculum - Financial Literacy  - take time to read through these and make comments by Sept. 28...great way to see that vertical alignment and help kids connect to prior learning.
• INFOhio.org Spotlight Resources:
• Explora - search engine by topic, includes lexile levels on all the resources included in the search including books,articles and primary source documents. Great for creating text sets to build vocab or content knowledge. Available in PreK-5, 6-8, and 9-12 INFOhio.org resources.
• Kids Infobits - searches across major K-5 magazines including Scholastic, CNN Newswire, Boys Life, Nat Geo, Discover for Kids, Dig, Ladybug and more.  Because this is a Gale product, once the articles are opened, there is a read aloud function, a highlight function, you can save to Google Drive or assign in Google Classroom.  Has visual and audio search support built in.
• NEA Arts Across the Curriculum - K-5 Resources (I found the dancing across the number line activity to be pretty cool!)
• Top 10 Ukulele Tips for Beginners (In case you want to learn how to play Ukulele too!)

Don’t forget to join in the CenterPoint Teaching & Learning Advisors –  #CurriculumMatters Twitter Chat about the Importance of High Quality, Content Rich Curriculum Thursday Sept. 6  4-5:00 PM EST

Read the blog posts at https://centerpointeducation.org/blog and follow #CurriculumMatters on Twitter to follow the conversation.  Please feel free to share this information with your colleagues, too. Looking forward to a lively discussion on this timely topic.