Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Age or Ability Specific Forums How to start a math club?

I am working with my dd's elementary school. I will be running the math club with the GT specialist. Her son is in the same grade as my dd and is a math whiz. I am writing the grant but the GT specialist's name will be included on the proposal and the principal will sign it.

If you are willing to do the administrative part of the club it may not be difficult to find a teacher to help out. I've been successful in getting teachers to help out with a variety of activities if they know they do not have to be responsible for planning or organizing.

If that doesn't work, you may be able to find a high school or college student to help. In some high schools students are required to do volunteer work. We ran a large part of our school carnival last week with volunteer high school students. Also, some businesses will allow their employees to volunteer at local schools. You may find an engineer or mathematician who would serve as your math expert.

I like the idea of the high school student! It would be a volunteer or community opportunity at the same time as starting something from the ground up. Maybe that'll work. The problem with a small charter school is limited staff who are already overtaxed with extra responsibilities (and limited resources), so I haven't been very successful in getting the one math teacher to undertake it. Maybe with some high school students we could try it.

Let us know how it works out. I think I will attempt to get a high school student to help out with our math club too.

I sent information to the math teacher like this.

Here are a bunch of competitions we could enter:

Rocket City Math - free!- three 45-minute tests given in Nov, Jan, and April

Continental Math League - $85/team - 5 meets, 30 minutes each

Purple Comet Math - free! - testing in the Spring

Math Kangaroo - $20/each - end of March

AMC8 - about $109 with registration, practice, etc. - Nov 18th test

Math Counts - Feb competition for regionals, March for state

Math Olympiad - $89 - 5 monthly contests Nov-March

State Math Competition - free! - Round 1 in Nov, Round II in Feb


I'm hoping the school will let us organize, even if math teacher is too busy. It could be so cool.

Texas Summer - can you give more info on the grant you are writing?

thanks,
Dazey

Me too, please.

Good luck cym!

Yes, I will get you some more information. It will probably be next week before I can get to it. Let me know if you have any specific questions.

Summer

specific questions, not as much, I just would like to hear what you did and how you accomplished obtaining funding and from where. DD8 proposed a math club to her teacher in first grade. I was told it was to go through student council and the teacher in charge arbitrarily shot it down. Perhaps if I could sweeten the pot with funding.........

No hurry, thanks, anything you could let me know about would be much appreciated. Feel free to PM if you wish.

Thanks again.

Sorry it has taken me so long to follow up on the grant info. It was a hectic last week of school.

The grant I am writing is a general math grant for the school. It includes funding for two grade-level sets of Zome, some fictional math books, and start-up math club materials. The total request is less than $5000. The math club expenses are only a tiny part of the grant.

There are several companies in our area that focus their chariable contributions on math and science education so I may submit a similar grant to several different programs to increase my odds. The grant also has a broad emphasis. The resources requested in the grant will help the struggling math students as well as the most advanced.

I am waiting to get some math TAKS information from the school to see if I use any of it to sweeten the grant proposal. If geometry is one of the weak areas in math, it will help the geometry emphasis of the grant. We are a Title I school so it is usually not difficult to get grants if you can make the time to write a grant proposal.

If I don't get the grant or cannot get one in time, I will request the $89 Math Olympiad fee from the PTA. If we cannot get the money from them, we will simply charge the kids $8-$10 each to be in the club. It is not a high cost, but even that can be cost prohibitive for some of our students.

Please let me know if you are interested in any specific details that I did not included.

Summer