As per popular demand, Chemical Misconceptions – prevention, diagnosis and cure. Volume I: theoretical background by Keith Taber has now been added to Learn Chemistry. This resource includes information about some of the key misconceptions that have been uncovered by research and ideas about a variety of teaching approaches that may help avoid students acquiring some common misconceptions.

Each theory chapter can be used in conjunction with chapters of Volume II. These are shown in the linked resources section below the main chapter (shown below). There is also information on how to use the resource, additional reading and a keywords index to show in which section which topics are covered.

Next month I’ll be adding In Search of Solutions to Learn Chemistry. Add your requests for the next resource in line to Talk Chemistry.

We recognise the Challenging Plants and Challenging Medicines resources contain a huge amount of information in the form of presentations, handouts, worksheets and experiment sheets for teachers and students. With 100 resources in Challenging Plants and over 50 in Challenging Medicines it is difficult to see how the resources link to each other and how seemingly biology-based resources are linked to topics taught by teachers every day.

We have now provided pedagogical overviews for Plants and Medicines, as well as spider diagrams showing how the resources link to each other.

The Challenging Plants Experiment resources can be seen as sets (shown below) of ‘preparation of salts’, ‘preparing and investigating inorganic complexes’, ‘analysing solutions using colorimetric measurements’, ‘rates of reaction’, ‘chemistry investigations’ and ‘plant chemistry/biology experiment’ – all areas a teacher needs to cover. These experiments can give a teacher the option to use a different experiment to demonstrate, for example, making salts, and do so with supporting material that gives the experiment a real-life context. The handouts and presentations are also linked through subject areas (shown below). These materials can be used in conjunction with the experiments to form topics and possible project work.

We hope these will be a helpful guide to the mass of information available through Challenging Plants and Challenging Medicines!

They belong to Christmas like turkey and mince pies: the Royal Institution (Ri) Christmas lectures. Each year they bring a touch of science straight to our living rooms.

The lectures are fantastic every year. But for us at the RSC, last year’s ones were even more special, because they focused on chemistry.

In his three lectures, Dr Peter Wothers – a chemist at Cambridge University – explored the chemistry around us. Filling the TV studio with lightning, explosions and burning flames, he looked at air, water and earth – three of the ancient Greek elements that tantalised alchemists for centuries – and the chemistry behind them. It was a fantastic display of why chemistry is fun.

But don’t worry if you missed the spectacle when the lectures were aired on the television! The RSC and our Learn Chemistry team partnered with the Ri to turn the best parts from the lectures into a set of teaching resources.
 
The resources are based around ten chemistry-related themes that Peter covered in his Modern Alchemist lectures. Many of them cover topics you are teaching in the classroom, such as atomic structure and the periodic table, radioactivity, climate change, the halogens and the alkali metals.


Dr Peter Wothers demonstrates the effect of altering the amount of oxygen present in the air

We have included background information, links to video clips from the lectures, questions and ideas for group discussion to help you teach these subjects. And if you or your students would like to find out more about a topic, you can easily follow the links to other Learn Chemistry resources on related topics.

We hope you enjoy using these new resources in your classes!

The Learn Chemistry team

Ps: If you haven’t seen it already, why not have a look at the Alchemy section on our Visual Elements Periodic Table?!