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Hydrates Take 2
"What are we doing to help kids achieve?" My students and I tend to have good experiences with a hydrate inquiry lab that I have "tweaked" (see the previous blog). Essentially, my students have...
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Earth Day 2017 - Chemistry Feeds Our World
The American Chemical Society will celebrate Earth Day on April 22, 2017. This year's theme is Chemistry Feeds Our World. I have gathered some resources related to food and cooking from ChemEd X in...
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Chemical Formula Challenge
With the start of the third trimester, it was time to reintroduce to my new students how to properly write chemical formulas with those polyatomic ions that they had become familiar with fourteen weeks...
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Investigations of Chemicals in Natural Food Coloring. Part 3: Sunflower
In this post I will explore the chemistry of the Sunflower dye found in McCormick’s Color from Nature food dyes. This is the last in a three-part series in which several experiments and demonstrations...
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Group Tests?
What are we doing to help kids achieve?Third quarter is like a marathon. Fourth quarter is like a sprint. Third quarter had ten weeks of no breaks, no snow days, grey weather, the flu and, in the mind...
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Action Research and Assessment
First, a word of caution...this pick is the result of a four year messy journey and a 17 page paper (that I helped author) about the struggles of trying to figure out how to teach. For those who do not...
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Tracing the Steps to the Conant Award
Highlighting the 2017 Awardee – Laura E. SlocumThe James Bryant Conant Award was established in 1965 and has had several sponsors. Most recently, Thermo Fisher Scientific sponsored the award from 2007...
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March for Science
On April 22, 2017, people all over the world will be coming together to stand up for science. The March for Science is a part of a global movement by scientists, science-enthusiasts, and evidence-based...
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Shorten Grading Time with this Stoichiometry Tool
As many chemistry teachers know, grading lab reports can be a very time-consuming task. For me, the lab report that has required the most time to grade is a stoichiometry lab that I have been doing the...
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JCE 94.04 April 2017 Issue Highlights
Resources To Inform Teaching and LearningThe April 2017 issue of the Journal of Chemical Education is now available online to subscribers. Topics featured in this issue include: green chemistry;...
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Especially JCE: April 2017
Earth Day, on April 22, is nearly here. The American Chemical Society (ACS) annually joins in the day, focusing on chemistry aspects of the environment, through Chemists Celebrate Earth Day (CCED). As...
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How do you meet your students where they are at?
I have had a variety of students with a broad range of academic abilities in my class at once. This hook doesn’t feel particularly deep until I stop and reflect for a moment on what that looks like. On...
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Compiling Student Data
In my years as a chemistry teacher, I did a water of hydration lab like the one described in Chad’s post about his hydrate lab experience. To assist in grading the lab results for this and other...
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A replacement Maxwell-Boltzmann Distribution Simulation
Do you ever have that Go-To demonstration or website for an activity that you really value? You've been using it for a few years, tweaked it to make it better - only to send your students there one...
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Announcing a Unique Virtual Conference: Chemistry Instruction for the Next...
Registration is now open for the inaugural Chemical Education Xchange Conference with a theme of Chemistry Instruction for the Next Generation. Recent chemical education research has informed the...
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You Are Invited: Chemistry Instruction for the Next Generation
ChemEd X and the Journal of Chemical Education (JCE) are collaborating to offer a virtual conference like most have never seen before. It is not a webinar. You do not have to schedule specific hours to...
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Using Visual BCA Tables to Teach Limiting Reactants
A few months ago I was searching the internet, looking for a better way to teach stoichiometry to my pre-AP chemistry students. While my methods of dimensional analysis “got the job done” for most...
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Rates Lab and what to do when things don't work....
What are we doing to help kids achieve? I don't know why I tend to get OCD over "rates" labs. Somehow...I just think they are cool. Students can change a wide variety of conditions and they see...
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Demonstration: Reaction of Magnesium and Silver Nitrate
I found a version of this demonstration online a couple of years ago. I admit, when I first tried it with my class it was mostly for a crowd pleaser to demonstrate the activity series of metals, but I...
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What to do after AP? Build and test simple dye-sensitized solar cells!
Not sure what to do after the AP chemistry exam? Have you considered having your students make solar cells? If your AP kids can understand batteries, solar cells are a logical next step. I usually do...
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