New AACT Resources to Help Teach the Periodic Table

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 an Atomic Structure unit. We will now focus on new resources to use in a Periodic Table unit plan.

This past year we added student video questions to all of the videos in our Multimedia library. If you use the History of the Periodic Table or the Dmitri Mendeleev videos to introduce the topic of the Periodic Table, both now have student activity sheets available.

Are you tasked with increasing your students’ scientific literacy? We have put together reading questions for a series of passages from the young reader’s edition of Sam Kean’s The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of Elements that are related to the elements in the AACT Sam Kean’s Disappearing Spoon video series. Additionally, all 11 of the videos in this series now have student video questions available for download.

We have also added several student activities that will help students learn about the element names, symbols, and periodic properties:

• In the activity, Lucky Seven, students use the Periodic Table and clues provided to identify element names. They then attempt to find the element names that are hidden in the puzzle. This activity was included in the May 2019 issue of Chemistry Solutions.
• The activity, Which Element Am I? challenges students with a list of clues that describe 50 different elements from the periodic table. Using their own knowledge and the help of the internet, students then determine the identity of each element based on the clue provided.
• Your students can test their knowledge of the Periodic Table by unscrambling element names and using them to solve a mystery message in the Elemental Mix-up activity. This resource was included in the November 2018 issue of Chemistry Solutions.

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