New AACT Resources to Help Teach Chemical Equations

As chemistry teachers around the country plan activities for their students, AACT will highlight 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 to support a unit on Chemical Names and Formula. We will now focus on new resources to use in a Chemical Equations unit plan.

Our simulation, Balancing Chemical Equations from PhET has an updated student activity sheet with sample problems and pre-activity questions that will help guide your students through the process of balancing a chemical reaction. It also includes extensive background information and vocabulary in the Teacher Notes, along with links to other online videos, simulations, and games.

The demonstration, Identifying Chemical Reactions is a great resource to help your students observe a series of seven reactions to learn how to identify evidence that a chemical reaction has occurred, write a word equation to explain a chemical reaction, and then convert a word equation to a balanced chemical equation.

Once your students are able to write and balance a chemical equation, use our new simulation, Predicting Products to help them identify what will be produced when two substances react. While using the simulation, students reference an activity series and a solubility chart to accurately predict the products of single replacement and double replacement chemical reactions. Associated particle diagrams will be displayed to help students better comprehend the reaction at the particulate level. Students also balance the chemical equation. The simulation is designed as a five-question quiz for students to use multiple times. This simulation was introduced in the March 2019 issue of Chemistry Solutions, our online periodical.

We hope that these activities can help you to reinforce several of the topics covered in a unit about Chemical Equations. 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.