Middle School Chemistry - Review

We finished up Middle School Chemistry from middleschoolchemistry.com this week, and I cannot say enough good things about this curriculum. It's totally FREE, but that it's nearly the best part. Middle School Chemistry was written by actual chemists, who clearly know the science, love it, and know how to teach it. Texts, labs, and animations are all available on the website in a clear sequence. Lessons reinforce and build one after another. Mane remembers things from the very beginning of the year because the concepts continue to be reinforced throughout the curriculum. Concepts that eluded me in college suddenly made sense when I went through the material with Mane. The text does not talk down to kids. It isn't silly or dumbed-down, yet it grabs the attention. The lessons all end with take-it-further labs and questions that relate the text and labs to real life situations.

And it wasn't hard. I'm serious. Chemistry is often considered the most difficult and esoteric of the sciences. Middle School Chemistry laid it all out in such a simple and straightforward way that it was almost impossible NOT to understand. It teaches all the correct vocabulary and concepts (I checked with my chemistry teacher husband) using language and explanations that you don't have to be a scientist to understand. After learning chemistry this way, though, a person could easily move on to become a scientist, having been taught the appropriate language in an understandable way!

Lab set-up to solve for an "unknown" substance

Can you tell what the unknown substance is?

Chemistry Lessons - Dissolving Salt & Sugar

Dissolving M&Ms (sugar) in water & alcohol

It's been a while since I've checked in about our chemistry class this year! Over the last month we've played with dissolving salt and sugar in water, alcohol and oil. We've discovered how the polarity of molecules affects how quickly the molecule can dissolve salt or sugar (if it can dissolve it at all).  Here's Mane in action:

Model of water dissolving salt

Dissolving M&Ms in water, alcohol & oil

We have continued to be very happy with MiddleSchoolChemistry.com! It's taken a lot longer to work through the lessons that I thought it would because we are doing every experiment and project in the lessons unless we absolutely cannot find materials. The early lessons were a breeze. The later lessons are more dense, and both Mane and I are getting a lot out of them! I'm understanding chemistry a lot better than I did in college!

Chemistry Lesson - Lewis Dot Diagrams

We are STILL loving the middleschoolchemistry.com lessons, and we got to the end of chapter 4 today and wanted to play around MORE with Lewis Dot Diagrams. So, I found this website that let us practice online:

http://chemsite.lsrhs.net/bonding/flashLewis.html

Then I started putting together a list of materials that we need for chapters 5 and 6. These chapters are a bit more materials-intensive than the previous chapters. For the homeschooling family this can be a bit of a challenge. I'm reading through the lesson to see what can be adapted and what we definitely want. If there's anything we feel like we definitely need and can't get locally, we'll be ordering from Flinn Scientific.

Covalent Bonding Experiment - Day 2

Yesterday I posted the beginning of our project separating hydrogen and oxygen in water with a 9v battery. Here's what we've got today:

 See the gas bubble in the top of the test tube? That wasn't there yesterday, and the tube was completely submerged under the water. So, no outside air could get into it. That's hydrogen gas!

We know it isn't oxygen collecting in the tube because the oxygen is reacting with (oxidizing) the copper wires and turning it blue at the bottom of the jar:

Note: This project is set up somewhat differently from the project described at middleschoolchemistry.com. We used 2 test tubes under water in order to collect the gas (rather than just watching the gas bubble in the jar). The wires go directly into the tubes under the water. We held the tubes close together with a rubber binder so that the electricity would flow between them better.

Atoms, Molecules, and Bonding

We are still working our way through chapter 4 of MiddleSchoolChemistry.com. We've worked through the lesson on energy levels and valence electrons. Today we talked about covalent bonding, double bonds, and ionic bonds. Then we put together a contraption to separate the hydrogen and oxygen in water! This one we did with Mango's help:

Submerged test tubes filled with water (no air bubbles) in a mason jar full of water

Placed wires under each of the test tubes without letting any air into the tubes!

Set-up Success!

Wires connect to 9 volt battery...

This one will sit on our table for a few days while we watch the tubes fill with hydrogen and oxygen, as the water molecules are blown apart by electricity!

Periodic Table

We're currently working our way through Chapter 4 of the American Chemical Society's middle school chemistry curriculum. Most recently, we did this activity matching elements with their symbols and with their numbers of protons, neutrons and electrons:

I sure did wish I had a laminator. I used packing tape to reinforce every single one of those cards!! The cards say things like, "The atom you are looking for has 3 more electrons than carbon." Or, "The atom you are looking for has about 16 neutrons." Students need to understand atomic number and atomic mass in order to figure out what those numbers are and what they mean. The elements table in front of Mane had places for her to fill in the blanks with numbers of protons, neutrons, and electrons based on atomic number and atomic mass.

American Chemical Society

Did you know that the American Chemical Society has a FREE chemistry curriculum for middle school students? You can find it here: middleschoolchemistry.com. The book is available for free download. Lessons include activity sheets, simple animation videos, labs and assessments! The lessons are lab-based, meaning that students learn by doing. Every Single Experiment we have tried from this curriculum has been successful, which is not something I've been able to say for other science lessons I've found online. I am totally impressed with this as an inquiry-based intro to chemistry!

In our first week, we made thermometers and learned about molecules in motion...

 

We made rain and frost...in lessons about evaporation, condensation, sublimation, deposition...

We watched alcohol, water, and oil separate out into three layers in our lessons about density...

I cannot say enough good things about how these lessons systematically reinforce concepts, particularly if you actually work through all of the labs and questions for each chapter. Embedded in the labs are lessons on the scientific method, variables and constants, control groups, and confounding factors. 

Hats off to the American Chemical Society! I am looking forward to digging into their other resources when we finish this set of lessons!