HELENA -- Superintendent of Public Instruction Linda McCulloch unveiled new Indian Education for All classroom materials Thursday, a day before the state celebrates American Indian Heritage Day.

Indian Education for All law mandates Montana schools teach all students about its American Indian tribes and reservations. The mandate was written into the Montana Constitution in 1972, but this year is the first that the state has committed substantial money to the directive.

The Office of Public Instruction has been partnering with several agencies, organizations and schools to produce the materials since receiving funding from the Legislature last July.

McCulloch said she wanted the materials to be ready for teachers to use in classrooms and for them to be readily accessible.

Videos, curriculum guides and model lesson plans are among the materials available for free to teachers on an Office of Public Instruction Web site.

''We're encouraging everyone, even those out of state, to use what's on our Web site,'' McCulloch said at a news conference Thursday morning.

McCulloch said about half of the $3.3 million allocated to OPI to implement Indian Education for All has been used so far.

In addition to the money OPI received to develop materials and promote the program, school districts are receiving their own funding to implement Indian Education for All. The amounts they receive depend on the number of students enrolled, and range from $195 for the Kester elementary school district in Garfield County to a little more than $660,000 for the Billings elementary school district. Schools started receiving that money on Aug. 25.

Districts are doing different things with the funding, McCulloch said. The Billings school district hired an Indian Education for All director. Some smaller schools are pooling their money together to send teachers to professional development training.

The office is also making suggestions for additional materials or activities the districts could spend money on to teach students about the tribes and reservations.

Because school districts have local control over their budgets, OPI cannot mandate the districts spend the money in a particular way, but can make suggestions.

''Schools were coming to us saying they have this money, but didn't know what to spend it on,'' said Tara Jensen, a spokeswoman for OPI. ''This gives them some ideas.''

Three videos, ''Tribes of Montana,'' ''Long Ago in Montana,'' and ''Talking without Words,'' produced by the University of Montana Regional Learning Project, in collaboration with OPI Indian Education Division, are now available to teachers. DVDs of those videos were mailed to schools earlier this week, Jensen said.

More resources will become available as schools continue to develop and implement curriculum.

''We're at a beginning point and it's very historic,'' said Denise Juneau, OPI's director of Indian education. ''We've waited 34 years for this to be funded and it'll take awhile to get it implemented, we understand that.''

McCulloch said a major emphasis of program is to integrate Indian education throughout the day, not simply setting aside a special time to focus on the topic.

''It isn't something that's separate or different. It's something that's integrated into other curriculums,'' such as math, music, reading and other subjects, McCulloch said.

OPI collaborated with the Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks to create 25 model lesson plans for K-12 teachers that feature a Montana state park. The lesson plans can be used in classrooms or adapted to the park itself. This gives teachers the opportunity to localize Indian education in their communities by going to the park nearest to them, Jensen said.

''This was a real logical thing to cooperate on,'' said Ron Aasheim with FWP. ''We get consistent questions about park sites and with a lot of them, Native American culture is a big part of the history.''

Another new resource is a K-12 language arts, science and social studies curriculum guide developed by Sandra Fox, an Indian education expert with the National Indian School Boards Association.