I attended a workshop about PARCC and middle school math at the NJ Principals and Supervisors Association in March 2014. The presentation was made by people from TMI Education, and these links are from their presentation.
Need a great activity to get your students working on problems while moving about the room? This middle school math activity is explained in a short video, but while the topic is math, you can adapt the exercise to other topics too!
Need some posters that explain the mathematical practices from the Common Core in terms the students can understand? This page has links to displays for grades K-7.
Ohio's Online Resource Center has a very good collection of inquiry-oriented, open-ended math questions that you can choose based upon grade level and topic! The range is from third grade to high school, so finding a quality question that meets your students' needs is easy!
How can you answer the perennial math question: "Am I ever going to use this in real life?" PBS's "Get the Math" website is a great way to show students how math is used in areas like music, fashion, and video game design. Thanks to Emily B. for sharing this one!
This is a good explanation of relationships that are NOT proportional and why. The candle problem is a good one--ask students, "How could you turn this into a proportion?" They would want to say that the statement should change to something like "How much candle is burned each hour?"