This is a concise lesson that looks at Dmitri Mendeleev’s periodic table, the changes and tweaks that he made and compares it against the modern day version of the table. The aim of the lesson is to show students how accurate Mendeleev was with his table, even with those elements that had not yet been discovered. They will work through some examples with eka-silicon and eka-manganese and also compare eka-aluminium’s predictions against those of gallium. Links are made to the development of the atom so students can understand how the atomic number was used by Mendeleev and how it is used now. Students are set homework to look at the developments that were made by other scientists as homework and this is not covered in this lesson.

This detailed and engaging lesson uses a range of tasks, discussion points and quick competitions to explore how the structure of metals is related to their properties. The lesson begins by providing the melting points for four metals and challenging the students to work out why mercury would be considered to be the odd one out. This task enables students to recognise that most metals are solid at room temperature and then the next part of the lesson guides students through explaining how this is related to the structure. The range of quick competitions are used to maintain engagement but also to introduce new terms such as lattice and delocalised so that students can recognise these in descriptions and use them accurately in their own. Students will recall that metals are good conductors of electricity and heat and now will be able to explain this with reference to the free electrons. Progress checks are written into the lesson at regular intervals so understanding can be checked at critical points and misconceptions addressed. The final part of the lesson makes link to related topics such as alloys and naming compounds. This lesson has been written for GCSE aged students.

A concise lesson presentation (27 slides) that looks at the key details of the sub-atomic particles and briefly explores how the atomic and mass numbers of the Periodic Table can be used to calculate the numbers of these particles in different atoms. The lesson begins with a Mathematical link as students are challenged to convert the size of an atom from standard form into a real number. Moving forwards, students will meet the three sub-atomic particles and be asked to predict which one is positive, neutral and negative in charge. The relative mass of a proton is shown and then students are asked to work out the mass of a neutron and an electron by observing some experimental results with a scales. Finally, the students are shown how to use the atomic number to work out the number of protons (and electrons) in an atom and how to work out the number of neutrons. This lesson has been designed to act as a knowledge recall and top-up as this should have already been learnt at KS3.

A fast-paced, engaging lesson that looks at the separation method of distillation and focuses on the use of key terminology in the correct context. This lesson has been designed for GCSE students but teachers could use it with KS3 students who are looking at the mixtures topic. The lesson begins by challenging the students to state which mixture from a choice of three could be separated by distillation. A lot of the key terms involved in this lesson and the separation topic as a whole begin with S and are often incorrectly used. Therefore some time is taken to ensure that the students know the difference between a solution, solute and solvent and can pick out the substances which would apply to each of these terms in different examples. Students will learn how distillation involves evaporation followed by condensation and the next task gets students to compare boiling points to understand how the difference in these points allows the separation to occur and will also recognise that distillation results in two substances at the end as opposed to the one in crystallisation. The remainder of the lesson challenges students to apply their knowledge to two understanding checks - a summary passage on distillation and then a description of how ethanol and water are separated.

A fast-paced, quick lesson which focuses on the key terminology that is involved in the separation topic so that students are confident with the definitions and to use them in context. A lot of the key terms begin with the prefix SOL and the opening task challenges students to use their Chemistry knowledge to convert numbers to letters to come up with these three letters. Having completed the crossword with the 5 key terms, solute, solution, solubility, solvent and soluble, students have to match the crossword clues with each term. Moving forwards, students are introduced to the term, saturated, and briefly shown the meaning of this word. The final task of the lesson challenges the students to use each of the 6 terms beginning with S to complete a passage about salt dissolving in a water.