As I write this, it is the day before the national AP Chemistry exam. We’ve been working toward this day since August. We’ve endured late hours, broken crucibles, anxiety, and tears. I’ve run weekend and evening review sessions, we’ve ta
“What are you reading?” This twist on the traditional icebreaker question kicked off a meeting session last summer. I was eager for the conversation to make its way around the table to me. On my plane ride the day before, I’d started The Martian by Andy Weir, and I was hooked.
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.
Have you read “Making Thinking Visible”? You should. It focuses on making student thinking visible to the teacher. While still learning to use the visible thinking routines, I really feel more conscious of students’ understandings than ever.
Here is a sample activity that I adapted to fit my honor chemistry students’ needs:
Last night I had the opportunity to do another lab that I wrote with my students. It is so exciting to see something go from words on a screen to a group of students working together in a laboratory. I learned so much as I walked around the room last night. Here are a few highlights:
The April 2015 issue of the Journal of Chemical Education is now available for subscribers at http://pubs.acs.org/toc/jceda8/92/4. This issue features articles on atmospheric and environmental chemistry. Also featured in this issue are: microfluidic devices; problem solving strategies; information literacy; kinetics & thermodynamics; investigations of gases and organic synthesis; outreach.
The HaberFilm.com website is a helpful resource for teachers that have interest in using the Haber video in their curriculum. Reading materials and lesson ideas are available. I recently used a lesson that my colleague created directly from the provided materials. You can check out that lesson here. The lesson included some background reading, viewing the video, participating in an excellent discussion and a follow up writing assignment.
Last year while attending the Biennial Conference on Chemical Education at GVSU I had the opportunity to hear a talk that showed a video of a chemical demonstration showing the burning of magnesium metal. We have all seen many of these videos (thank you YouTube) and probably have performed this demo for our own students many times. During the video it may have been represented with a chemical equation followed by the students being asked to balance the equation or maybe even predict the products. Although the use of video including the showing of the equation nicely represents the macroscopic and symbolic representation, what was so unique about this particular video is that it also included the particulate representation embedded on top of the video of the demo. This was the first time I had seen the particulate level representation done like that and so I was intrigued in wanting to find more of these representations.
Since my last blog about modeling, there have been additional opportunities added for training. If you don't see a location that works for you on this list, check out the AMTA website.
During our “Periodic Table and Periodicity" unit, we take about 3 days to learn the content and another 3-4 days to practice the content (more for Chemistry 1, less for Honors). One way that I have my students review the content is by playing a board game that I recreated from an NSTA conference a few years ago.
