New Classroom Resources Highlight: Chemistry Basics

As chemistry teachers around the country head back into their classrooms and begin planning 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. We’re beginning the year with articles, simulations, and activities that could be used to support a Chemistry Basics unit.

Throughout the years, AACT has shared news articles full of resources and articles that could be used to help teachers with topics they will teach throughout the school year. This article will highlight newer AACT resources to use during an introductory unit on the fundamentals of chemistry.

Laboratory Safety

The ACS Chemical Safety video series contains a selection of videos to introduce important safety concepts to your students. Choose from: Safety Mindset, Safety Data Sheets (SDS), How to Dress for the Lab and Personal Protective Equipment, Preparing for Emergencies, and RAMP for Students. The final video, RAMP for Teachers, outlines steps you can take to make sure your students are as safe as possible while exploring and experimenting in the lab.

The Cleaning up the Lab article and corresponding activity from the March 2022 issue of Chemistry Solutions teaches your students to be self-sufficient in the lab. To bring more kinesthetic movement and excitement to lab safety, try the Race to Safe resource.

New Chemistry Puzzles

To start off the year, students can work independently on either the ChemConnections puzzles or the Chemistry Emoji pictionary. While students may not be able to find all the answers right away, this could be a fun version of a pretest and post-test. 

New Animation

The Physical Properties and Particle Interaction animation explores the relationship between physical properties and particle-level interactions. Particle diagrams of common household substances are used to illustrate how forces of attraction influence melting points. Similarly, particle diagrams of the same substances dissolved in water are used to compare their conductivity in solution. This is a great visual introduction to how chemistry is the study of matter and interactions between particles at the small scale. The accompanying activity can be found here.

We hope that these resources can help you to reinforce several of the topics covered in a unit about Chemistry Basics. 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.