from Laura Slocum, JCE High School Associate Editor
Recently, I have spent many hours working with seven students as they develop their own demonstrations and hands-on activities focusing on elements—the theme of this year’s National Chemistry Week (NCW)—“Chemistry—It’s Elemental!” What a special privilege this has been for me. My love of chemistry and my desire to […]

By Dan Toomey, Edgewood Middle School, Madison, Wisconsin
I have used “A Kool Reaction from the Fine Print” JCE Classroom Activity with my 8th grade students as guided-inquiry method in order to introduce atoms. (This activity is the one that was done in the Chemistry Comes Alive! Part 4 NSDL/NSTA Web Seminar on October 15.) We […]

What can you and your students learn from videos showing reactions of the elements? A lot! The link below is to an article that describes what we learned from videos that show elements reacting with air, water, acids, and base and how what the video showed compared with textbook descriptions. Tied to this year’s National […]

Would your students like to use Facebook for science networking? Would you like them to? The link below goes to an article from the Journal of Chemical Education that describes the Elements on Facebook project which allows your students to support their favorite element.

This makes a great opportunity to engage students and the public in […]

Would you like to excite your students with an interactive periodic table that contains videos, graphing, data, and more? Here’s what it looks like.

Read about Periodic Table Live! and try it with your students! PTL! is a free resource available from the ChemEd DL at http://www.chemeddl.org/collections/ptl/index.html.
This post contains a PDF file of an article from […]

from Erica K. Jacobsen, JCE High School Editor
The rush is over. No, not preparing a classroom for the onslaught of new students or tweaking curriculum. The conference rush. As I write these words, I am happy to have achieved my goal of surviving August, which included two meetings within the space of three weeks. (Cue […]

This links below describe a neat way for your students to do research on a particular element and display their results to your entire class. Each student constructs an icosahedron with a different kind of information about an element on each of the 20 faces. The icosahedra are then hung from the classroom ceiling in […]

Periodic Table Presentations and Inspirations
by Mary E. Saecker
Graphic Representations of the Periodic System
The 2009 ACS National Chemistry Week theme of “Chemistry—It’s Elemental” celebrates the elegant, orderly, and inspirational icon of chemistry, the periodic table. However, as John Moore points out in his August 2003 editorial, Turning the (Periodic) Tables (1), there is not one […]

from Erica K. Jacobsen, JCE High School Editor
Ever experience the phenomenon that occurs once you’re interested in or working on a particular topic? Suddenly, all sorts of examples related to that topic pop up unexpectedly in your everyday life. The examples may have even been there all the time, but you didn’t really notice them. […]

from Laura Slocum, JCE High School Associate Editor
Probably like many of you, I connect light and color through science—an object absorbs various types of light and then the color of the object is a result of the light that it reflects. The color we see also depends on how our eyes and brains translate that […]