Small Classroom Grant Recipient

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My students were very excited to learn about the new set of beautiful calculators that showed up in our class one day. Because of MCTM's grant program I was able to purchase 20 new TI-30XS calculators for my classroom. Starting in seventh grade. students need a scientific calculator to solve problems in the statistics and geometry units of the course. More specifically, they need calculators to solve problems involving circles, volume, area, and averages. Thank you MCTM for helping make high-quality calculators accessible for my current and future students at Somers Middle School! 

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Cristine Boles

Somers Middle School

Math and Band Teacher

Montana Aerospace Scholars Program Seeks High School Sophomores

In collaboration with NASA, Museum of Flight, and the University of Washington, registration for the Montana Aerospace Scholars program is now open!

Apply for this free dual-phase program that focuses on Earth & Space Science. This experience exposes students to the opportunity to work face-to-face with professional engineers, NASA scientists, university students and educators.

Students who successfully complete the online course will be invited to participate in an all-expenses paid STEM-focused experience at the Montana Learning Center at Canyon Ferry Lake near Helena.

For more information, visit
https://www.museumofflight.org/Education/Explore-programs/Montana-Aerospace-Scholars

Student applications are due February 15th.

Classroom grant recipient - Polson High School Using New Geometry Curriculum

Have you ever felt like your Geometry textbook publisher just took their old book, tried to find a couple of the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics (CCSSM) standards that were sort of taught in each section, slapped those numbers on the front of the lesson and claimed that their currculum is “Common Core Aligned?”

A year or so ago we went searching for something better.  A web search landed us at www.geometrycommoncore.com, a curriculum developed and written by a high school geometry teacher in Las Vegas, Milken Award winner Mike Patterson.

Mike built the curriculum from scratch, and it was built specifically to address the CCSSM head-on.  Each standard is covered with student notes, worksheets, and test bank questions. Additional activities, GeoGebra technology activities, overviews, pacing guides and YouTube videos are also available.  There is a version of every worksheet that includes QR codes that students can use to link to YouTube videos for help on some problems. All materials are available both as pdf’s and as Word documents, so you can open and edit them as you like.

You can use as much or as little of the materials as you like.  You could even keep your book and supplement with these materials.

It is Google Classroom compatible and some of the technology activities are designed to be assigned and turned in via Google Classroom.

We began by piloting Unit 1 (Congruence).  We liked the materials and felt that they were doing what they were supposed to do in terms of tackling the CCSSM directly.  So we went ahead and purchased two complete teacher licenses for our school for the very reasonable price of $100 each. A site license is available for $550 if that is more economical for your school.

Bonus upside:  Practice problems and solutions for this curriculum are NOT available on Slader.com.  We were having significant issues with students using this website for homework, and felt that we needed a solution that was not available to students online, and that did not involve having to write an original set of practice problems for each topic.

We would like to thank MCTM for funding the purchase of these curriculum materials with a small classroom grant!

James McKee

Stephanie Anderson

Polson High School