Fun Math Stuff Meets Standards

It's not that standards necessarily kill the fun stuff in math, it's just that when the learning is broken down into so many little objectives that have to be descreetly assessed, it feels like there's just no time to step back and play around with general concepts. However CTAP region 4 has spent a few years finding the great online interactive resources (the fun stuff) and aligning them to the California standards and the CA adopted math textbooks. This makes them much easier to integrate, which provides students with real opportunities to experiment with concepts in a ways that can't be done with paper and pencil. The project is called the Middle School Math Project and there's a matrix for 6th grade, 7th grade, and Algebra 1 with all the standards, resource links, and pages of the textbooks to which they align. Look for the little hearts to see CTAP's favorites, and look for the little earth icons to see ones that are online interactive tools - like this collection of Geometry applets in the National Library of Virtual Manipulatives.