This activity is used as a reinforcement activity following my use of JCE Classroom Activity #113: An Interlocking Building Block Activity in Writing Formulas of Ionic Compounds. It could be used as a stand alone activity to support writing ionic formulas and names.
At NSTA (in beautiful San Antonio, Texas), this past week, I shared activities designed to explore three levels of representation AND provide formative assessment techniques to reveal student misconceptions. All of the activities shared have been featured in the Journal of Chemical Education or have been linked to research articles in JCE as supporting information.
Whether it is a completely unique idea or just a twist on an old classic, engage in collaboration with other chemistry teachers around the world and publish your work. There are many venues and the pool of precollege chemistry instructors that are already contributing is relatively small.
If you haven't seen them yet, check out the final release of the Next Generation Science Standards. There is helpful information at the site. My home state of Michigan is currently asking for public input in order to plan support for implementing NGSS.
Celebrate Earth Day, which is on Monday, April 22, 2013. Earth Day was first officially recognized on April 22, 1970. This year the theme is "Our Earth: Handle with Care." The topics this year include water, air, plants/soil, and recycling.
I spent my whole prep period today playing with a site I hadn't seen before: PHYSICS 2000 @ http://www.colorado.edu/physics/2000/index.pl?Page=cover.html. I need to spend some more time there.
The American Chemical Society is hosting a special High School Chemistry Day for teachers at the ACS Fall National Meeting in Indianapolis, IN, on Sunday, September 8-12, 2013. Presentations will explore new methods of teaching, classroom tools, resources, activities on a range of topics. A special High School/College Interface Luncheon will provide an opportunity to exchange ideas and network. See the ACS High School Chemistry Day Web site for details and/or download the flyer.
I attended and presented at the National AP Conference in Las Vegas on July 18th and 19th! Adding Inquiry to the course is one of the major changes to how we will teach AP Chemistry. I shared some resources and gave tips during my presentation. I am sharing those resource in this post. I am also sharing items that I found especially helpful from presentations that I attended and conversations I had with other teachers.
Greg Rushton and I attended and presented at CHEMED in Waterloo July 28th through August 1st. We enjoyed the ice cream and frozen snacks at the JCE sponsored Ice Cream Social Monday evening. We presented JCE resources for AP Chemistry on Tuesday and JCE resources for General Chemistry on Wednesday. The resources and links from those meetings are linked here.
Photoelectron Spectroscopy or PES is a topic included in the redesigned AP Chemistry curriculum. I have heard quite a bit of discussion surrounding this addition. It has caused panic in some teachers because they never learned it themselves, have never taught it before and/or they have no materials to teach the topic. I have been spending some time searching for a lesson plan for my own class
