Celebrate Mole Day 2022

Mole Day is celebrated by chemists, chemistry teachers, students, and chemistry enthusiasts each year on October 23rd from 6:02am to 6:02pm. The National Mole Day Foundation has themed the 2022 celebration as Finding NeMole! You can find more information, jokes, and even party supplies about the celebration on their website!

The AACT Classroom Resource library has many teaching resources related to the mole concept for use in the classroom. Below are some highlights:

• For those who haven’t yet discussed the mole, it might be helpful to use the Avogadro video with your students as a starting place. This will help students understand how the mole concept was developed and review other related historical moments in chemistry. While watching the 5-minute video, students can complete associated comprehension questions.
• In the popular activity, Calculating Moles in Daily Life, students use dimensional analysis to complete calculations and conversions for the number of moles, atoms, and molecules in several everyday household items using collected data.
• The lab, Moles of Food gives students the opportunity to see the connection between the mole concept and everyday foods. Students analyze the nutrition label of various foods to determine the amount of specific elements in each serving.
• Use the lab, It’s Mole Time, to have students determine the number of moles of chalk used to write their name, the moles of sucrose ingested while chewing gum, and the moles of alcohol evaporated when using hand sanitizer.
• In the lab, Chemistry Composition Challenge, student are tasked with designing a method to solve three chemistry problems involving moles, molecules and density.
• Find some crayons, and have students determine how many moles of paraffin are used when coloring a piece of paper in the activity, Can you Color a Mole? Additionally they will calculate how many molecules are moles of wax are in a crayon.

Just for fun

Several related activity options for teachers to consider include:

• The Mole Mischief Puzzle to challenge students to solve a collection of chemistry based clues—each answer contains the unit “mol” in it.
• The Mole Crossword Puzzle tasks students with completing a crossword puzzle containing clues related to the mole concept.

A larger list of options for teaching resources related to the mole concept can be found in the AACT library. Additionally, several great external resources are listed below:

External Resources

• Mole Day Infographic from Compound Interest
• Meet the Moles from the ACS Office of Science Outreach
• Video: How Big is a Mole? from TED-Ed
• ACS ChemClub Periodic Table of Moles Poster (*for purchase)
• Mole Day Podcast from Lab Out Loud

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