One of my favorite ever projects was these Borax Snowflake Christmas Ornaments that I made a few years ago with my chemistry students with coffee filters. The ornaments are super glittery and sparkly in person. The pictures I took of my students’ finished ornaments really didn’t do them justice. It may be too late to …
Labs
I used this Mix and Match Mass Mini Lab with my Chemistry students at the beginning of the year to give them some practice estimating mass and measuring mass using the triple beam balance. I wanted my students to get a feel for different masses. For example, I wanted my students to have a visual …
When I was prepping to teach chemistry a few years ago, I ran across this Spot the Safety Hazards Picture. I thought it would make the perfect addition to my beginning of year lab safety review. I took the image and prepared a file to print the picture on 11 x 17 cardstock to use …
Years ago, when I was teaching chemistry, I came across a free lesson plan online that had students work through real-world safety scenarios involving chemical accidents. I thought it was a great way to emphasize lab safety at the beginning of the year and give students a chance to practice reading a SDS (Safety Data …
While preparing to review lab safety at the beginning of my chemistry course, I ran across a “Spot the Safety Hazards” story on Ms. Randall’s Science Weebly. On page 3 of this PDF, she includes a story that students must read. As they read, students must underline or highlight all of the lab safety violations …
What Not to Do Laboratory is a great way to review lab safety procedures at the beginning of the school year. I used this a few years ago with my chemistry students, and it sparked many great conversations. Source of Activity The original What Not to Do Laboratory poster is the creation of The Laboratory …
I made this summary of lab report requirements for my chemistry students to glue in their interactive notebooks. Free Download of Lab Report Requirements
We made ice cream in a bag as our last lab of the year in Chemistry. My students were pretty skeptical that the process would actually result in ice cream, and they were pleasantly surprised as a result. One student brought in M&M’s and Heath bits as topping. Super yummy! Here’s our recipe if you’re …
My chemistry students requested that we do something fun for Valentine’s Day. We haven’t done a lab in a while, so I put together a Conversation Hearts Lab. I saw that you could do the standard Dancing Raisins activity with conversation hearts, so I decided to try it out. It turns out I should have …
In chemistry, we did a density challenge this week. Students had to calculate the maximum amount of sand that could be placed in a film canister so that it still floated. We tested our canisters today, and every canister floated! I ordered a set of 24 film canisters from Amazon especially for this lab. The …
Before I share the chromatography butterflies bulletin board that my chemistry students created, I should make it clear that I’m teaching chemistry this year under some not-so-normal circumstances. I still want to keep my chemistry class as hands-on as possible. This has meant that I have to get creative to find lab activities that my …
I’m still on a quest to clean out my drafts folder before the new school year starts in a couple of weeks. As most of you know, last year I taught one section of physical science. When I announced to my math classes that we would be celebrating Pi Day, my science kids wanted to …
I am so blessed to be married to a teacher because my husband doesn’t even bat an eye when I ask him to do things like buy me some six foot long pieces of pipe insulation at Lowe’s. Note to self: pick a non-windy day to try and bring this into the building! Shaun also …
Teaching a science class this year has me doing more projects than I’ve probably ever done in all my previous years as a math teacher. Setting up projects in an effective way has been a definite learning curve. This week, my students have been working on designing egg drop devices. I had students break into …
When we got back from Christmas Break, I realized that we still hadn’t done any labs to explore the effect of concentration on reaction rates. Frustrated from how our previous labs had gone, I decided to just do a whole-class demonstration so we could move on to the next skill. We worked together to create …
For our next experiment on chemical reactions in physical science, we made rust. I thought that I had learned from my mistakes with the previous effervescent tablets lab. We spent a class period designing the lab together. We wrote a hypothesis as a class. We discussed how to set up the experiment and collect …
I decided to follow up our glow stick demonstration with an effervescent tablet lab. This, sadly, did not go that well. I assumed that my students would be able to design their own experiments. My groups tried to do this, but most groups didn’t pay attention to what data they would need to collect. My …
This glow sticks reaction rate lab was one of my favorite physical science lessons of the year! To get my students thinking about the impact of temperature on reaction rate, I decided to do a demonstration with glow sticks. It turned into one of the most enjoyable lessons of my teaching career! Here’s what my …
We tested our new found stoichiometry skills by figuring out how many molecules we would consume if we drank from the school water fountain for 30 seconds. I had my students make predictions before we started. Their predictions turned out to be waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyy off. Let’s just say the highest prediction was 1,000,000 molecules of water. …
What do you do when a chunk of your physical science class is away at the state softball tournament, it’s Friday, and you just finished a chapter but don’t want to start the new chapter until Monday? You decide to give your students a piece of sidewalk chalk and a chalk messages measurement lab to …
To wrap up my physical science students’ “I can take accurate measurements” skill, I decided to use the “Mini Metric Olympics” Activity from AIMS. The original activity was published in Math + Science: A Solution. This book is available to check out from the Internet Archive’s Online Lending Library for free for an hour at …
My physical science students really enjoyed this Hit the Target Lab. It’s my first time teaching physical science, and I’m learning so much every day. When I typed up this mini-lab sheet, I thought we would be able to calculate the error and percent error. I didn’t think through this very well because my students …
Before taking our quiz in physical science over error and percent error, I wanted to give my students a last chance to get some practice and ask questions. I decided the best way to use our time was to do two mini labs. I have to get creative with my labs for this class because …