I print a colored class-set of the table front/back (there is more information on the back of the squares), and a worksheet for each student. These include the number of valence electrons, atomic radius, number of electron shells, reactivity, boiling and melting points, electron affinity and electronegativity, and more! My most favorite activity to jump-start a unit on Atoms and the Periodic Table is this Periodic People activity. The Periodic Table is an amazing tool because it has SO MANY patterns embedded in it. I love this unit because the growth in my students’ understanding is so significant and they undergo a transformation before my eyes! With the exception of the occasional chemistry-obsessed student, most of my students start out this unit thinking that the Periodic Table is some sort of super complex graphic for brainiacs and mad scientists, or they simply think it’s an absolute bore.īut after a few weeks of study, they can navigate the families of elements on the table, interpret atomic structure based on an element’s position on the table, and glean information about how different atoms will interact with one another! Experiencing my students fall in love with the Periodic Table is amazing every year! In this post, I’m sharing some of my favorite activities to teach my middle school students about the Periodic Table. This was impressive, because he left gaps for elements that hadn’t been discovered yet and he did this before we fully understood the structure and composition of atoms.The unit that I most love to teach is Atoms and the Periodic Table. Several scientists arranged the elements they knew about in different ways before Dmitri Mendeleev arranged them as they are today. The periodic table is useful to chemists because of the way the elements are arranged but this didn’t happen quickly or by chance. They are usually relatively hard and are often used as catalysts (they help speed up chemical reactions, without being used up in the reactions themselves). The transition elements are metals and often react with other elements to form brightly coloured compounds. The block in the middle of the table, beginning in the fourth period, contains the transition elements. For example, you’ll find metals on the left-hand side and non-metals on the right. This means that, however many elements might be listed in an equation, you’ll always be able to distinguish between them.Īs you move along each row (or period), there are repeating patterns in the chemical and physical properties of the elements in each one. When you write the symbol for an element, it’s really important that the first letter is a capital and the second letter (if it has one) is lower case. Giving them symbols makes this process clearer, especially as these symbols are recognised all over the world, even if the names themselves vary in different languages. Classroom presentation as MS Powerpoint or pdfĭOWNLOAD ALL Reading and writing chemical symbolsĬhemists spend a lot of time talking and writing about elements: what they’re like, how they react, how they change.Teacher notes, printable cards and answers as MS Word or pdf.Student activity and worksheet as MS Word or pdf.Learners can use the card sort included in the teacher notes or get the information from the presentation slides to build their own miniature table with just nine elements and three groups. Walk in the footsteps of the chemists who organised the modern periodic table of elements. Use the accompanying activity to organise unknown elements using their similarities, physical properties, appearance and reactivity. Alternatively print it and use as a handout. Display the poster in your classroom or on a projector. Infographic poster and fact sheet, student worksheet, card sort and classroom presentation slides for organising elements activity.
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