I started teaching in a chronological order when I began using Modeling Instruction in my classroom. During the second year of "walking in the footprints of the scientists that came before us", I wanted my students to see where they were walking and a colleague and I came up with the idea of making footprints for each of those scientists and posting them on a timeline.
In the June 6th, 2016 Chemical and Engineering News magazine put out by the American Chemical Society, C&EN talks with Deborah Blum, journalist and author: From the article’s description, ‘The Poisoner’s Handbook’ writer talks about the beauty of chemistry and why she wants people to know more about it.
PBS has a wonderful new mini-series titled, "The Mystery of Matter: Search for the Elements". At the time of this post, the series is freely available to stream through your local PBS station. (The series is also available for purchase.) The series is broken into three episodes which track the evolution of Chemistry in different time periods through the eyes of seven scientists.
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.
This is a lively collection of essays about some of the great (mostly English, but not entirely so) chemists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It brings to life many great names of our science.
I have in my library several chemistry textbooks from before 1860, but "Chemistry No Mystery" is not one of them. Reflecting as they do an approximation of the chemistry known at the time, they provide insight about the history of both science and pedagogy. I learned about this one from my friend Ron Perkins, a skilled chemical demonstrator, and "Chemistry No Mystery" is the most demonstration-oriented of the old textbooks I have seen.
Robert Boyle is known to most chemists solely for his Law relating the pressure and volume of a gas, but this privileged son of the Earl of Cork was not as interested in discovering an equation as he was in determining what his experiments could tell him about his own relationship to God.