Over four weeks, students embark on a project-based learning journey to create an "As Seen on TV" commercial while learning nomenclature concepts! Through this interdisciplinary approach, students not only develop their content knowledge but also teamwork, critical thinking, and presentation abilities in a real-world context.
Ashley Green shares how she recently changed up her nomenclature unit by asking her students to look for patterns in names and formulas.
Nora Walsh outlines the interactive notebook pages she uses for her unit on Bonding. All of the documents and foldables are available for download.
For your enjoyment, we present lists of chemically-related words that end in the letters “-cation” but do not actually refer to the positively-charged chemical species. The lists are available for download in the Supporting Information.
Bring the fun of the viral word game "Wordle" into the chemistry classroom!
In this ChemBasics Talk, Nora Walsh offers everything necessary to plan a unit on the topic of chemical bonding and naming including introductory and discovery activities, manipulative activities, practice problems, her favorite online teaching resources and more. Watch the recording and access resources she shared.
While students usually do well with naming binary ionic compounds of fixed charge, many students struggle with naming ionic compounds that contain ions of variable charge. This activity uses a technique often found in humanities classes, a gallery walk, as a guided inquiry experience harnessing real-life applications of several sets of related compounds to address many common misconceptions and lead students to discover the meaning of the Roman numerals when naming and writing formulas for these compounds.
The two-page instruction sheet that accompanies the Luster Leaf Rapitest© Soil Test Kit could be a useful curriculum resource for chemistry teachers for generating discussion about the key aspects of the content or for helping students practice close reading skills. This article will briefly describe the contents of the instruction sheet and suggest possible uses in the general chemistry curriculum by posing questions for students to answer or consider.
This is the third in a series of classroom activities using paper tools to teach organic nomenclature. This post covers the two common naming systems used for carboxylic acids and derivatives, and second for alcohols, thiols, ethers, amines, and ketones.
To help introduce students to organic nomenclature in a way that clearly summarizes the patterns that exist in the IUPAC system, a series of paper tools were developed. The paper tool in this activity can be used to introduce the IUPAC naming of major classes of organic compounds. These paper tools are easy to print and distribute to every student each semester.
