Whether you are looking to add a bit more scientific inquiry to your labs or simply looking for a great stoichiometry lab that can be added to your collection, I encourage you to try something like this with your students!
Stephanie O'Brien took a tip from the elementary school teachers and created literacy stations to help increase the amount of reading and writing in her classroom. Literacy centers support students by arming them with the tools to utilize when examining text documents, charts, graphs, pictures etc. to take the content and make it comprehensible. She provides examples of literacy centers she uses in her classroom.
Students will be engaged in this activity that will help them make the connection between food and chemistry. Acid, bases and pH are addressed.
I will share how I use the Target Inquiry activity, Change You Can Believe In. I have realized that I need to include particulate models within the assessments after the lab to fully evaluate my student's conceptual understanding.
I think this experiment provides a fantastic vehicle to involve students of all ages in small, hands-on and exploratory research projects. Like many others, my students and I have investigated various aspects of this interesting fountain.
Whether you are introducing collision theory or something more demanding like reaction order, the reaction between sodium thiosulfate—Na2S2O3 and hydrochloric acid can provide a consistent, accurate, and engaging opportunity for investigating these topics.
My IB seniors are just wrapping up our unit on electrochemistry and redox. This has always been a challenging topic within the IB curriculum. Admittedly, electrochemistry has not ever been my strong suit either, so this year I aimed to strengthen the unit with two additional demonstrations.
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.
A few years ago, we launched a weather balloon during our summer science camp. The balloon reached an altitude of 30 km (100,000 ft)! Among other things, this project ended up being a great way to teach campers about the gas laws and how atmospheric pressure decreases with altitude.
Last year, I worked hard to teach my students how to fail and I believe it was the most important lesson they could have taken away from my class.
