AACT Resources to Help Teach the Periodic Table

As chemistry teachers around the country plan activities for their students, AACT will be highlighting resources from our high school resource library that can be used to reinforce topics in different units throughout the school year. Our last post highlighted resources that could be used to support an Atomic Structure unit. We will now focus on articles, videos, simulations, and activities that could be used in a Periodic Table unit.

Since our original post in October 2017, we have added a few more resources that you might consider trying with your students. Additionally, we have updated a unit plan that uses many of our resources to help you teach a unit on the Periodic Table.

If you use the Mendeleev, Lavoisier, or History of the Periodic Table videos from our Founders of Chemistry series with your students when you are introducing the topic of the Periodic Table, we have added an activity sheet that includes questions for students to answer as they watch the videos. You can access the video questions in the sidebar of the video webpage. Earlier this year we introduced our Student Pass benefit which allows your students to have access to any of the videos in our multimedia library. You can learn more about this new benefit in our February news post or on the Student Pass FAQs page on our website.

Do you teach periodic trends? The new activity, Making Connections between Electronegativity, Molecular Shape, and Polarity will show students how the shape of a molecule is relative to its placement on the Periodic Table. This resource utilizes Ptable.com, an interactive website that allows the user to collect data about the properties of the elements.

Another exciting addition to the library is the Periodic Table of… Mistakes from the May 2017 issue of Chemistry Solutions. It can be used as a classroom activity, or even as an informal assessment at the end of the unit. This fun activity challenges students to find 25 errors, such as element name, symbol, placement and trends, on our Periodic Table of Mistakes. A correct version of the table and an answer key are also available with this resource.

We hope that these activities can help you to reinforce several of the topics covered in a unit on the Periodic Table. Most of these lessons were made possible by great teachers who shared their own resources. We need your help to keep the collection growing. Do you have a great demonstration, activity, or lesson related to this topic that you would like to share with the community? Please send it along for consideration.