Organic chemistry was when I fell in love with chemistry. Also known as Chem 210 at the University of Michigan, it was the first time I actually started to connect what was going on at the nanoscopic level to the macroscopic world. Since then, I’ve been hooked.
I hate to sound like a broken record but I used two activities from Grand Valley State Target Inquiry Program that worked amazingly well and had a great "flow". Chad Bridle wrote two inquiry activities that dovetail together. The first is "Change You Can Believe In". Students are presented first with nine cards that are particulate drawings of changes that occur in matter.
Last winter I watched a webinar put on by ACS and AACT called "NGSS in the Chemistry Classroom." As a result of watching that webinar, I took an activity that had NGSS Science & Engineering Practices (SEP) integrated into it and tried it out in class. In this activity, students are required to develop their own procedures and data tables.
You can perform an orange to black chemistry demonstration using materials commonly found in stores. The reaction appears to be similar to the Old Nassau reaction, but uses greener reagents. This is a great demonstration to do around Halloween time.
Build a propane gun for your students! Construction is inexpensive, easy, and the effects are spectacular.
The “Elephant Toothpaste” experiment is a very popular, albeit messy chemistry demonstration. To carry out this experiment, place a 250 mL graduated cylinder on something that you wouldn’t mind getting messy.
This is a Chemical Reactions lab that I modified to meet NGSS guidelines.
Suitable for Online Instruction: An independent study on the chemistry topic of coordination compounds and complex ions suitable for AP Chemistry and first-year college chemistry students is presented. Originally published 3/20/2014.
This laboratory exercise accompanies the article "A guided group inquiry lesson on coordination compounds and complex ions". The laboratory serves as part of an extended exercise on the chemistry topic of coordination compounds and complex ions. The entire lesson as described in the article also exposes students to how chemical research is conducted and the conflicts and uncertainties that lead to new theories and discoveries.
I expect that most high school chemistry teachers assign some type of laboratory related to types of chemical reactions including synthesis, decomposition, single replacement and double replacement reactions. I have used several published versions, but I am sharing my modifications.
