Teaching basic chemistry was something I looked forward to when I was teaching high school sciences. Every year brought new challenges.
I suppose chemistry can be taught strictly from a book. That is so boring to me because science is hands on, experiments, seeing how things work. So my classes spent a lot of time in the lab.
There are lots of experiments available for a chemistry class. Most of them take lots of expensive equipment and chemicals. Small schools like the ones I was teaching basic chemistry in often don’t have lots of money for such supplies.
Some of those chemicals can be dangerous. Acids, poisons, fumes. These were not things I wanted to use a lot of in my classes. High school students aren’t always the most careful people.
Writing Science Activity Books
After I left teaching in a classroom and started writing books instead, science activity books seemed a good fit. Except I didn’t want a textbook, I wanted something more fun, more challenging.
I tackled botany first with “The Pumpkin Project” and found the concept of a science investigation, science activity, trivia, puzzles, stories and more fit the bill. But I also found writing such a book was a lot of work.
Instead of writing another book, I put chemistry projects first and motion physics later on my website. This brought up the challenge of how to do these without all the equipment I used to use from my storage closet. That forced me to take a good look at the experiments to find ways to achieve the same goals using everyday supplies.
This led to my second science activity book, “The City Water Project”. It has the investigations, activities, trivia, puzzles and stories I like to include. Lots of work went into doing all the investigations, activities and puzzles.
Tackling Basic Chemistry
Those chemistry projects sitting around bugged me. I started playing around with the idea for “The Chemistry Project”. Trivia and puzzles are harder for chemistry. Story ideas are harder too.
Still, there is the challenge of teaching basic chemistry for fifth grade up and all those projects using easy to obtain equipment and supplies.