My kids have had Bridges at one of their schools. They've all moved beyond it now, so my experience is a little dated (but not too far out in time). Our kids were in a very similar-to-EM program prior to Bridges, and our experience with Bridges was that it incorporated Visual Math but was a bit different from EM, not so much wrap-around repetition through the years as EM, and our kids liked it much better.
OTOH, I think the thing that mattered the most across *all* the curriculums my kids had prior to pre-Algebra (which adds up to, I think 4 or more lol!) was the *teacher* and the approach to teaching. When a teacher says you *have* to do it this way, sometimes that was ok, if it was just for the sake of learning that particular method and then the child, once they'd shown they'd mastered that method, was allowed to use whatever method they wanted to (that was legitimate and gave correct answers :)) to solve the particular type of problem. We did have one issue once with one teacher who insisted our dd couldn't use traditional long division to solve long division problems even though she understood the concept and knew how to use the alternative method that the curriculum was teaching. I don't see that as a curriculum issue but instead see it as a teacher inflexibility issue, and that is dependent on the teacher, not the curriculum. We also found that ability to subject accelerate, etc were more school/teacher dependent than curriculum dependent in elementary school, regardless of curriculum.
I'm not sure what to think about the not being able to explain word problems as well as the previous year. Although techniques for solving problems were somewhat different in Bridges/EM/etc than traditional math, the word problems that our kids brought home could mostly have come from any curriculum. I think I'd try to discern if he's having difficulty with the problem due to the method required to solve it, or is it an issue of having difficulty understanding the concept.
Best wishes,
polarbear
