It’s mid-May, your dual credit and AP exams are done, but you still have weeks of school to go! What do you do? We’ve rounded up a few fun ideas that range in both content and type of activity.
Projects
First Day Chemistry Engineering Activity - Melissa Hemling
In this article, the author describes an activity in which students design a superball with teams competing to create the ball with the highest bounce. While the title presents this as a first-day activity, this would also be an excellent activity for the end of the year.
Bookend Activities to Highlight Chemistry as the Central Science - Amanda Patrick
In this article, the author talks about projects she does to help students see that chemistry is the central science. All the activities are suitable for after-exam activities.
The AP Exam is Over, Now What? - Kristen Drury
This article describes an activity in which students create a chemistry game and pitch it to the class. An overview of the project, with rubrics, is included.
What Are You Doing After the AP Chemistry Exam? - Anne Schmidt
This article describes a book study project with sample images and an assessment template.
Chemical Mysteries Project
Tom Kuntleman (@TommyTechnetium across multiple social media platforms, including YouTube and TikTok) is well-known for posting engaging and interesting science demos and mysteries on social media. Consider choosing one of Tom Kuntzleman’s Chemical Mysteries, and having students create a poster, infographic, or display of some kind based on the experiment. Many of his mysteries have a deeper explanation on ChemEd Xchange (for example, Chemistry Trick: Can you light water on fire? is explained in Chemical Mystery #5: How to burn water )
Organic
Some teachers choose to teach a mini-organic lesson. Here are two activities to introduce nomenclature and functional groups, as well as a synthesis lab.
Introductory Activities:
Using Desmos to Create an Organic Nomenclature Card Sorting Activity - Ben Meacham
In this post, a card sort that introduces organic functional groups through discovery is created using Desmos. A link to the activity is included.
An Activity for Introducing Organic Functional Groups - Kristen Drury
This activity also involves a card sort of organic compounds. In this activity, the author added properties to the cards and asked students to consider properties when grouping like compounds.
Manipulative Paper Tools for Teaching Simple Organic Nomenclature
This series of manipulatives by Melanie Harvey helps students learn about the basics of organic nomenclature and functional groups.
A Manipulative Paper Tool for Teaching Simple Organic Nomenclature: Part 1, Hydrocarbons
Lab:
Facile Method to Synthesize an Organic Compound - Athavan Alias Anand Selvam
External Projects:
Compound Interest has a library of hundreds of infographics that explain chemistry through history, the periodic table, and examining features of real-world items and phenomena. Having students choose an infographic and translate it to another product (such as a poster, an advertisement for the molecule, or a KWL chart) would be a highly engaging, low-prep activity.
Reactions is a YouTube channel that collaborates with PBS to produce videos that teach chemistry through current events and topics in the news. This provides the opportunity to do something similar to what is described above with the Compound Interest infographics.