With science lab supplies, students get exposure to real world

<p>The Greenwood Community Middle School science teacher wanted an easier and more efficient way for her students to measure long distances.</p><p>Students in Tracy Guy’s class have completed assigned labs that require measuring long distances by picking up yardsticks, notching a measurement and picking the yardsticks up over and over again to complete the assignment.</p><p>Now, they have a new and more efficient way to complete their labs.</p><p>Guy was awarded a $418 MAC grant from a McDonald’s Restaurants of Central Indiana. She was one of three teachers in the northern part of the county to receive the grant that is meant to help teachers purchase materials they need to conduct hands-on assignments in their classrooms, according to a news release from the company.</p><p>Two teachers at Clark-Pleasant Middle School, Anna Conner and Marsha Keith, also received grants to help them in their classes.</p><p>Guy is using the money to buy measuring wheels and tape measures that will help her students measure long distances during labs she annually conducts.</p><p>She has taught science for 13 years and would see students have to work hard with yardsticks to measure long distances during distance and displacement labs. A better way for the students existed, she said.</p><p>&quot;I got to thinking how much better it would be if they got a measuring wheel,&quot; Guy said.</p><p>Part of Guy’s teaching method includes trying to find ways that students can connect to what they are doing in the real world. Guy realized that employees who measure for a living in surveying or construction work were not using a yardstick. She wanted to teach her students how to use tools that they would need in a career, she said.</p><p>&quot;I am always trying to find things I can introduce the students to that will give them exposure to things real people will do in jobs,&quot; Guy said.</p><p>The grant was enough to buy eight measuring wheels and six tape measures, which will help each lab class go quicker and smoother, she said.</p><p>“It will make all these labs go so much more smoothly and we will be able to get them done faster,&quot; Guy said.</p>