Bridges Community School

Families -

This week we were so fortunate to have our artist in residence share his knowledge about art, music, and physical education activities and Indigenous People. Mr. Tomayo shared his knowledge and our students definitely benifitted from learning games, art and musical activites. Thank you, Mrs. Chambers for arranging this experience!

Today, it was amazing to see so many families for our picnic and stations. It is always amazing to see our Bridges Bears come together as a community. Thank you to everyone who helped to support a station or with set up, clean up or playground supervision.

The next couple of weeks are full of fun, friendship and the end of another school year. Thank you as always for ensuring your child is rested and ready for the day. These last days can be exhausting and help to provide closure to another amazing school year!

Congratulations to Mrs. Hatlestad for everyone she has impacted. She is always student centered, works tirelessly for her students, families and colleagues and she is a true team player!

Together in Learning! Mrs. Rittmiller

Thank to staff and parents for your amazing support and help with our stations at Bridges today. It was a great afternoon filled with smiles, laughs and "This is the best day ever".

Dear Families,

Our district values your feedback! We are surveying MAPS families during the month of May in order to gain insight into your perception of our school and district effectiveness. To ensure we continue to provide high quality, rigorous learning experiences that meet the needs of our learners and prepare them for college and career, we need your feedback. We want to know what you think.

To administer these surveys, we have partnered with Panorama Education to conduct our 2024-2025 Family Survey. Panorama safeguards your privacy, keeping your responses confidential. The survey shouldn’t take more than a few minutes to complete, and will be a valuable source of information for us as we work to make our schools and district as good as they can be.

You may complete the survey online between May 1, 2025 and May 28, 2025 using a computer, tablet, or smartphone by visiting the website: https://surveys.panoramaed.com/mankato/login and entering your school’s access code list below:

3293314538

We thank you in advance for your thoughtful responses. If you have any questions about the survey administration, please don’t hesitate to contact me.

Thank you,

Jody Rittmiller

Dear Families,

We want to remind you that our ACES School Age Child Care Program uses the school playground as part of its daily programming. To ensure a safe and structured environment for ACES students, the playground is reserved for their use until the program ends at 6:00 p.m.

After 6:00 p.m., the playground is open to the public. We appreciate your cooperation in helping us maintain a safe and supportive space for all students.

If you’re looking for alternative play spaces before 6:00 p.m., the City of Mankato provides a list of parks here, and a map of North Mankato parks can be found here.

Thank you for your understanding and support!

Update on Global Studies and Our Dream Team:

• We identified the 14 home languages and the order to introduce them during community groups for the 2025-26 school year. We will be reaching out to families to help us with a little video so we learn how to correctly pronounce and greet each other with welcome and hello in different languages!

• We continue to plan for our "being here and there" experiences inside and outside the classroom to enhance our learning around our CORE topics.

• Friday, March 14 our staff had inquiry based learning training at Minnesota State University, Mankato. We will continue our learning in June. We are excited about the hands on learning, engagement and cross-curricular content where students help to guide their learning! Curiosity is KEY!

• Our kindergarten and 2nd grade teams met this past week to create the IBL unit of student to incorporate ELA and social studies standards into a key topic! Our grade 3, 4 and 5 teams have also been hard at work!

Find more information HERE.

Looking for a way to connect to MAPS? We strive to connect our community to our district and schools. Subscribe to this newsletter to get the current information and links to events.

Follow MAPS Facebook and Instagram for student celebrations:

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ISD77MAPS

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/isd77maps/

MAPS Website: https://www.isd77.org/

Bridges BAC Website: BAC website link: : https://bridgesbears.weebly.com/faq.html