Middle level teachers need to show students that chemistry is not just about blowing things up or memorizing the periodic table of elements. We should help them see that chemistry involves living organisms as well as nonliving objects and is much more than a school subject or the industrial production of materials. We must lead students to realize that since all matter is made of elements, the components of the human body, the foods we eat, the things we touch, smell and see around us could all be classified as “chemicals” as easily as anything listed on a product label or created in a laboratory.
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You may not think of engineering and squirt guns in the same sentence. However, like many examples of engineering design, the squirt gun pump mechanism is uncomplicated, yet elegant, and very inexpensive to manufacture. The design is widely used because of its simplicity and low cost. With only a few moving parts, it is able to deliver a stream of water, a spray of cleanser, or a squirt of liquid soap. In this article, the authors will examine how these simple, everyday pumps operate. In addition, a lesson is included, which follows the 5E Learning Cycle Model.
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Connecting science with different cultures is one way to interest students in science, to relate science to their lives, and at the same time to broaden their horizons in a variety of ways. In the lesson described here, students make kimchi, a delicious and popular Korean dish that can be used to explore many important chemistry concepts, including fermentation, chemical reactions, and acidity and alkalinity. During this activity, students use scientific techniques and methods to explore the nature of kimchi, they learn to measure the pH of a food using a variety of techniques, and they come to understand the ways that food can be preserved.
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High school chemistry can be intimidating to some students, so it is critical that we engage students in nonthreatening preparatory investigations during middle school. Based on the learning cycle model (Bybee and Landes 1990), this lesson invites students to investigate disposable diapers. As they explore the properties of sodium polyarcylate, a super-absorbent polymer exposed to water and simulated urine (colored salt water), students practice many inquiry skills: observation, measurement, graphing, and data analysis.
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Melt away the winter blues with this series of chemistry investigations. Here the author describes how she capitalizes on students’ love for snow days, bubble gum, and ice cream to reinforce what they have learned about percentage concentration of solutions and the effects of a solute on the solution. To do this, students perform three different 45-minute inquiry-based labs on these topics.
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Students within the Findlay, Ohio, City School District, as well as students across the country, struggle with understanding physical and chemical changes. Therefore, in this article, the authors suggest some standards-based activities to clarify misconceptions and provide formative assessments to measure your students’ progress as they determine the difference between chemical and physical changes.
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“The Element Walk” lesson is effective at teaching students the elements that exist in common substances encountered every day. Students walk away from the lesson with a set of general rules that help them to easily identify the elements around them. They also end up with a greater appreciation of the elemental compositions of living, once-living, and nonliving objects, and the connections among the three categories.
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Middle school science teachers need to address two issues concerning storage. First, if it is insufficient, they need to work with administrators to secure additional storage area(s). Second, whether sufficient or not, good housekeeping practices are in order for safety and liability reasons. This month’s column outlines some safe storage and housekeeping hints for the science classroom.
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Our Sun is an incredible fusion machine that has been churning out energy for approximately five billion years. In another five billion years, when the internal temperature of the star begins to change, the balance between the thermal pressure pushing outward and the force of gravity pushing inward will become imbalanced, and the Sun will move on to the next stage of its life. But that is a topic for a future column. Let’s turn back the clock, instead, and look at the early life of our star. Also included in this month’s column is an outline of celestial events during the month of October.
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Learning how the periodic table has developed over time can provide an important foundation for students’ future science learning, as they begin to explore the explanatory power of other models in science. In this activity, students are given the opportunity to investigate the generation of the modern periodic table, through a process of creating their own plausible periodic tables. In addition, students learn about Mendeleev’s contribution and the nature of science through inquiry-based instruction.
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This project highlights a dissolving unit that was part of an eighth-grade, semester-long investigation into matter. During the dissolving unit, students explored the concepts of mixture, solution, dissolving, saturation, and conservation of mass. Dissolving is an advanced concept that involves the atomic structure of matter and the nature of chemical bonds. However, dissolving is also a common experience in students’ lives (e.g., when they mix sugar in lemonade). The unit allowed students to explore everyday materials in new ways, address common misconceptions, and pursue scientific discovery.
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The International Boiling Point Project is an online, collaborative project for students in grades 6–12 in which they investigate the impact of four factors (room temperature, elevation, volume of water and heating device) on the boiling point of water. A detailed procedure is provided for students in order to limit the number of variables involved, so students can make valid comparisons of the data submitted by classes from around the world. An overview of the experiment is provided here with an emphasis on the data-collection and analysis aspects of the project.
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