A Science teacher by trade, I've also been known to be found teaching Maths and PE! However, strange as it may seem, my real love is designing resources that can be used by other teachers to maximise the experience of the students. I am constantly thinking of new ways to engage a student with a topic and try to implement that in the design of the lessons.
A Science teacher by trade, I've also been known to be found teaching Maths and PE! However, strange as it may seem, my real love is designing resources that can be used by other teachers to maximise the experience of the students. I am constantly thinking of new ways to engage a student with a topic and try to implement that in the design of the lessons.
This bundle of 4 lessons covers the majority of the content in the sub-topic C2.3 (Properties of materials) of the OCR Gateway A GCSE Chemistry specification. The topics covered within these lessons include:
Allotropes of carbon
Changing state
Nanoparticles
All of these lesson presentations and accompanying resources are detailed and engaging and contain regular progress checks to allow the students to constantly assess their understanding.
This bundle of 9 lessons covers the majority of the content in the sub-topic C3.1 (Introducing chemical reactions) of the OCR Gateway A GCSE Combined Science and GCSE Chemistry specification. The topics covered within these lessons include:
Formulae of ionic compounds
Conservation of mass
Writing chemical equations
Writing ionic equations
The mole
Mole calculations
All of these lesson presentations and accompanying resources are detailed and engaging and contain regular progress checks to allow the students to constantly assess their understanding.
This is a concise, fast-paced lesson which guides students through the critical skills needed to calculate the atom economy of a chemical reaction. It has been designed for GCSE students and focuses on the calculation as well as interpreting the final value. In order to calculate the mass of the desired product and other products, students have to be able to calculate the relative formula mass - therefore time is taken to revisit these skills and worked examples are used with this and the actual calculations to enable the students to visualise how they should set their work out. The lesson finishes with some progress check questions where students are challenged to state which of four chemical reactions has the highest atom economy. This lesson could be taught in combination with the percentage yield topic and an accompanying lesson on that calculation is available on this site.
This bundle of 19 lessons covers the majority of the content in Topic C2 (Elements, compounds and mixtures) of the OCR Gateway A GCSE Chemistry specification. The topics covered within these lessons include:
Relative formula mass
Empirical formula
Pure and impure substances
Filtration and crystallisation
Distillation
Chromatography
Metals and non metals
Electronic structure
Forming ions
Ionic compounds
Simple molecules
Giant covalent structures
Polymer molecules
Metallic bonding
Allotropes of carbon
Graphene and the fullerenes
Changing state
Nanoparticles
All of these lesson presentations and accompanying resources are detailed and engaging and contain regular progress checks to allow the students to constantly assess their understanding.
This bundle of 6 lessons covers the majority of the content in Topic C10 (Metals) of the core and supplement sections of the Cambridge iGCSE Science Double Award specification. The topics and specification points covered within these lessons include:
Describe the general properties of metals
Describe metallic bonding in terms of the lattice and electrons and use this to explain malleability and conductivity
Describe alloys as a mixture of a metal with another element
Explain why alloys are used instead of pure metals
The reactivity series
The use of carbon for the extraction of metals from their ores
The series of reactions in the extraction of iron
Extraction of aluminium
All of these lesson presentations and accompanying resources are detailed and engaging and contain regular progress checks to allow the students to constantly assess their understanding
This bundle of 6 lessons covers all of the content in Topic C9 (The Periodic Table) of the core and supplement sections of the Cambridge iGCSE Science Double Award specification. The topics and specification points covered within these lessons include:
The Periodic Table as a method of classifying elements and its use to predict properties
Describe the relationship between group number and outer shell electrons
Describe and predict the properties of the Group 1 elements
Describe the properties and reactions of the Group 7 elements
The transition elements
The noble gases
All of these lesson presentations and accompanying resources are detailed and engaging and contain regular progress checks to allow the students to constantly assess their understanding
This bundle of 5 lessons covers the majority of the content in Topic C2 (Experimental techniques) of the core and supplement sections of the Cambridge iGCSE Science Double Award specification. The topics and specification points covered within these lessons include:
Understand the use of paper chromatography
Interpreting paper chromatograms
Pure and impure substances
Separation methods including filtration, crystallisation, distillation, fractional distillation and paper chromatography
All of these lesson presentations and accompanying resources are detailed and engaging and contain regular progress checks to allow the students to constantly assess their understanding
This bundle of 7 lessons covers most of the content in sub-topic P4.3 (Radioactivity) of the OCR Gateway A GCSE Combined Science specification. The topics or specification points covered within these lessons include:
Atomic nuclei
Isotopes
Unstable nuclei and emitting particles or gamma rays
Writing balanced equations to represent decay
The concept of the half-life
The different penetrating powers of alpha, beta and gamma
Recall the differences between irradiation and contamination
All of these lesson presentations and accompanying resources are detailed and engaging and contain regular progress checks to allow the students to constantly assess their understanding.
This bundle of 2 lessons covers all of the content in the sub-topic C3.2 (Energetics) of the OCR Gateway A GCSE Combined Science specification. The topics covered within these lessons include:
Distinguish between endothermic and exothermic reactions
Draw and label a reaction profile for both reactions
Explain activation energy
Calculate energy changes in a chemical reaction by considering bond making and bond breaking energies
All of these lesson presentations and accompanying resources are detailed and engaging and contain regular progress checks to allow the students to constantly assess their understanding.
This bundle of 3 lessons covers the majority of the content in the sub-topic C2.3 (Properties of materials) of the OCR Gateway A GCSE Combined Science specification. The topics covered within these lessons include:
Recall that carbon can form four covalent bonds
Explain the properties of diamond, graphite, fullerenes and graphene in terms of their structures and bonding
Use data to predict states of substances under given substances
All of these lesson presentations and accompanying resources are detailed and engaging and contain regular progress checks to allow the students to constantly assess their understanding.
This bundle of 4 lessons covers the majority of the content in the sub-topic C3.3 (Types of chemical reactions) of the OCR Gateway A GCSE Combined Science specification. The topics and specification points covered within these lessons include:
Explain reduction and oxidation in terms of the loss or gain of oxygen and the loss or gain of electrons
Recall that acids form hydrogen ions when they dissolve in water and solutions of alkalis contain hydroxide ions
Recognise and describe neutralisation reactions
Write balanced equations for the reactions of carbonates and metals with acids
Recall that relative acidity and alkalinity are measured by pH and describe techniques and apparatus to take these measures
All of these lesson presentations and accompanying resources are detailed and engaging and contain regular progress checks to allow the students to constantly assess their understanding.
This is a concise, fast-paced lesson that introduces students to addition polymers and guides them through drawing displayed formulae to represent both the monomers and polymers involved in these reactions. Students will learn the conditions needed for these reactions and that the polymers produced by addition reactions are the only products. The main part of the lesson involves a step by step guide to show students how to draw displayed formulae. Hints are given throughout the process so that students can remember the key ideas and are able to represent these substances accurately. A number of progress checks have been written into the lesson so that students can assess their understanding any misconceptions can be addressed.
This lesson has been written for GCSE students
An engaging, practical-based lesson presentation (34 slides), accompanied by an assistance sheet, which together look at how the results of displacement reactions can be used to order the metals into the reactivity series. The lesson begins by introducing a displacement reaction and ensuring that students understand the meaning of this term and how it relates to the topic of the lesson. Students will carry out a series of 12 displacement reactions, involving 4 different metals and will then be challenged to interpret the results to place the metals into their allocated positions in the series. Moving forwards, the students are given the results of more reactions, some which occurred and others which didn’t so they can place the remaining metals into the reactivity series. Time is also taken to understand how the position of hydrogen in the series can be used to predict the results of reactions between metals and acids.
This lesson has been written for GCSE students but could be used with higher ability KS3 students
This lesson explores how the temperature affects the position of equilibrium in a reversible reaction. This can be a difficult topic for students to understand and therefore the aim has been on the key details.
The lesson begins by challenging the students to recall the rules of a dynamic equilibrium in order to recognise how if the equilibrium position changes then so do the concentrations. Links are made during the lesson to related topics such as endothermic and exothermic reactions and some time is taken to go back over calculating energy changes so that the type of reaction can be determined. The forward reaction in the Haber process is used as the example so students can see how an increase in temperature in this exothermic reaction would lead to a decrease in the yield of ammonia. Students are then challenged to use this example to explain how a decrease in temperature would affect the production of methanol. This worksheet is differentiated so students who need extra assistance can still access the learning.
This lesson has been written for GCSE students.
This is an engaging lesson which uses a range of tasks and quiz competitions to ensure that the important details about elements are embedded so that students can use them in related Chemistry topics. The lesson begins by looking at the chemical symbols that are used with the elements. Students do not have to know the symbols off by heart because of the widely available Periodic Table but a sound knowledge will always help going forward. Time is taken to ensure that students understand how the symbols have to be written so that those with two letters consist of a capital and a lower case letter. In a race against each other, students are challenged to complete a crossword by converting symbols to the name of elements. This will result in a winner, a second placed and a third placed student who can be given a gold, silver and bronze medal. The atoms within each of these medals is explored so that students can learn that the gold and silver medals will only be made up of one type of atom and are therefore elements whilst the bronze is an alloy. The remainder of the lesson looks at some of the uses of the different elements and a homework task gets students to put this into written form.
This lesson is suitable for both KS3 and GCSE students.
This is an engaging and informative lesson that looks at the group of unsaturated hydrocarbons known as the alkenes and focuses on a few properties, their displayed and chemical formulae and identification. This lesson has been designed for GCSE students and works nicely with the “alkanes” lesson as students can use learning from both lessons.
The lesson begins by ensuring that students recognise a key difference between the alkenes and the alkanes in terms of the carbon-carbon bond. This shows them that there is no such substance as methane. They are guided through the rules of drawing alkenes, with examples of ethene and propene used so that they can then apply this technique to draw butene. Working together with the teacher, they will be able to write the general formula that connects this group of substances. The rest of the lesson focuses on the term unsaturated and how this affects them in terms of the identification test with bromine water as well reactions with hydrogen. The lesson finishes by getting students to recognise a use of ethene in making the alcohol, ethanol.
This bundle of 7 lessons covers the majority of the content in Topic C9 (Separate Chemistry 2) of the Edexcel GCSE Chemistry specification. The topics covered within these lessons include:
Detecting cations
Detecting anions
Alkanes as saturated hydrocarbons
Alkenes as unsaturated hydrocarbons
Testing with bromine water
Complete combustion of hydrocarbons
Polymers
Biological polymers
Alcohols
Carboxylic acids
Production of ethanol
Nanoparticles
All of these lesson presentations and accompanying resources are detailed and engaging and contain regular progress checks to allow the students to constantly assess their understanding.
This bundle of 10 lessons covers all of the content in the sub-topic C2.1 (Purity and separating mixtures) of the OCR Gateway A GCSE Combined Science specification. The topics covered within these lessons include:
Explain what is meant by the purity of a substance and use melting point to distinguish pure from impure
Calculate the relative formula mass separately and in a balanced symbol equation
Deduce the empirical formula of a compound
Explain that many useful materials are formulations of mixtures
Describe and explain the processes of filtration, crystallisation, simple distillation and fractional distillation
Describe the processes of paper and thin-layer chromatography
Recall that chromatography involves a mobile and stationary phase
Interpret chromatograms
All of these lesson presentations and accompanying resources are detailed and engaging and contain regular progress checks to allow the students to constantly assess their understanding.
This bundle of 10 lessons covers the majority of the content in the sub-topic C2.2 (Bonding) of the OCR Gateway A GCSE Combined Science specification. The topics and specification points covered within these lessons include:
Describe metals and non-metals and explain the differences between them
Formation of ions
Common reactions of metals
Explain how the atomic structure of metals and non-metals relates to their position in the Periodic Table
Explain how electron arrangement is related to group and period number
Describe and compare the nature and arrangement of chemical bonds in ionic compounds, simple molecules, giant covalent structures, polymers and metals
Explain chemical bonding in terms of electrostatic forces and as the transfer or sharing of electrons
Construct dot and cross diagrams for simple covalent structures and ionic substances
All of these lesson presentations and accompanying resources are detailed and engaging and contain regular progress checks to allow the students to constantly assess their understanding.
This bundle of 6 lessons covers all of the content in the sub-topic C1.2 (The Periodic Table) of the AQA Trilogy GCSE Combined Science specification. The topics and specification points covered within these lessons include:
The arrangement of the Periodic Table by atomic number and electron configuration
Development of the Periodic Table
Metals and non-metals
Group 0
Group 1
Group 7
All of these lesson presentations and accompanying resources are detailed and engaging and contain regular progress checks to allow the students to constantly assess their understanding.
