Expanding Your Horizons - Math & Science for Girls

If you haven't heard of the Expanding your Horizons (aka - EYH) conferences you're missing out. These are one day conferences for girls in which women role models, from math and science related fields, do hands-on workshops with girls to inspire them to consider working toward careers in science, technology engineering, and math. I've been involved in the Mills College conference and the San Franciso State Univ. conference, but there are conferences all over the Bay Area and in most states in the country. The San Francisco EYH is coming up Saturday November 3rd, so if you know any middle school girls who would benefit from some fun inspiration in these areas, check it out here. And to find other sites around the country check with the national organization here.

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.