Welcome Back and Thank You!
Welcome back! After a long summer break, we’re kicking off the new school year by sending a massive than you out to Dr. Phillips High School and its students for their astonishing involvement in OMC this past year. Not only is Dr. Phillips the first OMC high school maths service club at a public school in Orlando, last year they sent more volunteers to us than any other school, public or private. This is a fantastic achievement for OMC and Dr. Phillips. We want to thank Robert Palmer and Mary Ballerino, guidance counsellor and maths coach at Dr. Phillips, for keeping students up to date with OMC events, hanging OMC flyers up in the guidance office and forwarding OMC emails out to students and Mu Alpha Theta. This really helped spread the OMC message, thank you!
We also want to thank two students who have started an OMC club at Dr. Phillips High School. Madhav Solanki, a senior, and Lindsey O’Donnell, a junior. Both of whom have worked incredibly hard on our OMC internships this summer and have contributed massively to current OMC projects.
Not only did Madhav attend all 4 weeks of the OMC internship, after many attempts his persistence pulled through and he finally found a teacher sponsor to facilitate starting an OMC club at Dr. Phillips High School. Thank you, Afiya Montgomery. He organised the OMC table at the club fair and managed to get 20 students to sign up to the club in only one day!
Madhav’s OMC table at the club fair
Madhav always goes above and beyond in everything he does and is a pleasure to work with, were expecting to see some fantastic things from him in the future. Welcome Madhav!
Lindsey – who like all our OMC volunteers is a passionate and high achieving student – completed two weeks of the internship at OMC this summer. She worked with Dr. Maria Droujkova of Natural Math, together with Madhav and 10 other students, to develop our original lesson plans for elementary age students. The project with Maria is part of the alliance with Natural Math, which aims to help support growth and capacity for OMC.
picture: Lindsey teaching a class of 1st, 2nd and 3rd grade girls using Geometiles.
Lindsey and Madhav’s building activity was tested at the first class using Geometiles, which is a set of inter-locking tiles that serves as a perfect platform to encourage curiosity and allow students to explore maths in creative ways. Geometiles, as well as books, can be purchased on the OMC store for the same prices as on Amazon, with 50% of proceeds funding OMC programs. Lindsey says “Working with children allows me to once again experience the creativeness of the human brain in earlier stages. I would recommend OMC to any child who is interested in math or wants to see it in a different way than what school teaches them”. Lindsey and Madhav are working hard to improve the Geometiles activity and will be running it again this year.
Again, a massive thank you to everyone mentioned in this post for your involvement in OMC. Your continued support helps keep OMC doing what it does best – making math accessible and fun to all. Don’t forget to read our next post where you can find out about all the ways you can get involved in OMC this fall!
picture: Madhav and Lindsey on the internship
