Middle school chemistry

Today we did chemistry and tomorrow we'll be doing more chemistry as we work to catch-up on what we missed due to being sick with Covid. No one really minds, though, because everyone is enjoying what we are doing. Better yet, they are understanding what we are learning in chemistry.

I think I mentioned the program we are using before, but I am so impressed with it that I'm going to mention it again. It is the Middle School Chemistry program developed by the American Chemical Society. The information is all online and is free. You can download the entire program or copy pages as needed. I think it is extremely well done. The teacher pages are clear and give plenty of information and instruction; the student pages have been just the right amount of work for my crew. They do answer all the questions but haven't rebelled at feeling as though it is busy work. There are also animations that help explain each concept and help the students visualize what these molecules and atoms might look like. There is an experiment for every lesson with the students being asked to think about how one might design an experiment to show a certain concept. Everyone has been engaged and interested.

Today was dealing with the concept of density. First everyone learned how to find volume, then we discussed mass, finally moving onto D=m/v to find density. We used calculators and that made everyone more than happy to do the calculations that were required. And there were quite a few calculations. I had purchased density cubes (which are super cool and everyone was entranced by them.) There are ten cubes of different substances, so they had to weigh each of them then find their density. Once they did that, they were given a list of the densities of all the things that the cubes were made out of and they then matched the density to the substance.

So, if you are thinking about chemistry for your late grade school/middle school student, look into this. Even if you think you can't teach chemistry. There are enough teacher materials to get you up to speed. My goals for doing chemistry with my crew this year are first, to give them some basic information... atoms, molecules, periodic table, reactions... how things work on a molecular level. Secondly, I want to give them a good feeling about chemistry; that it is something accessibly and not scary, that it is interesting, that it is something they can do. So far, we seem to be very successful.