Popular Resources For Teaching Acids and Bases
By AACT on March 18, 2025
As members of AACT, you have access to a huge classroom resource library. Finding the right labs and learning opportunities for your classroom can be overwhelming. This year, AACT will feature popular resources for units you may teach. Use these news posts as a guide to try something new!
Start off the unit by impressing your students with the Milk of Magnesia Magic demonstration. As vinegar is added to the Milk of Magnesia with universal indicator, there are some beautiful color changes as the pH becomes more acidic. As an extension, consider talking about how Milk of Magnesia can help heartburn due to its basic nature. Water with universal indicator can be used as a control, which highlights how the milk of magnesia helps to mitigate the effects of stomach acid on the body. This demonstration can also be used as a lab for AP students.
Try the Egg-straordinary Issue lab in place of a more standard titration. Students will use the results to determine the percent composition of calcium carbonate in an eggshell. This lab can be scaffolded well, as the author provides users with a cookbook lab and an inquiry version.
The Acid & Base Guys video is a great companion to a lecture on the different definitions of acids and bases. The video covers the Arrhenius, Bronsted-Lowry, and Lewis acids and bases.
We hope that the activities in this unit plan will help you to reinforce several of the topics covered in a unit about acids and bases. 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.