Teaching Resources

Creative Chemistry

Online course, Web Site/Portal

Medium

Cooperative learning, Problem solving

Fundamental Chemistry

Primary School, Lower Secondary School

English

• The prerequisites
Whether you are a teacher, doing chemistry at school, or are simply just interested in chemistry, Creative Chemistry has lots for you.There are full-colour worksheets and teaching notes for fun activities suitable for a chemistry club, and around three hundred pages of question sheets and practical guides for GCSE and A Level Chemistry. You will also find fun chemistry puzzles, interactive revision quizzes and molecular models. Choose from the featured selection below, use the Search facility, or enjoy just browsing.
• The contents
Fun practical activities, Interactive Crosswords, GCSE worksheets and practical guides, Wordsearches, Concentration game. Pupils are to solve tasks and answer basic questions as well as provide results. Themes are very interesting, connected to real life and nature.
All items can be demonstrated on real life examples.
• The aims
To ensure the safety of our students, we work to a ratio of one teacher to every eight students, and have the help of capable sixth form chemistry students. In every activity, the students wear safety glasses, smocks and gloves. I strongly suggest you try out each activity yourself first, and check your local health and safety rules before going ahead. Read this first. You are free to copy and use any of the worksheets in school or at home, but please do not try to sell them or pass them off as your own work! If you find my work useful, it would be nice to hear from you. Creative Chemistry has a selection of interactive chemistry crosswords just for you! Give them a go for fun or for revision. You can play them online, or you can save them to print out and solve later. Whatever you decide, good luck.
• Task Description
The task descriptions seem sometimes quite long, but it is necessary because the experiments could be conducted at home, therefore the pupils must understand everything very well. For that matter the instructions are quite clear and straightforward. Points, received from work appears as a good source of motivation
• How to use it in class
As written on the website: it can be used in experimental/ practical lessons, but it can also be solved as homework. I think, students like home projects, they can work in groups or they can compare different results and discuss them.

• Points of strength
Very interesting themes, properly written instructions and tasks, feedback
Provide for cooperation between teachers, pupils and parents
Knowledge received by actually conducting experiments is much larger than by watching experiments on TV or video. For example: Aluminium can be anodised fairly easily, and dyed permanently using fabric dyes or fountain pen ink. Used drinks cans form an inexpensive source of aluminium sheet, though you could splash out on new sheeting if you felt like it. Our students have been very creative with anodised aluminium, producing jewellery, badges - even a Klingon dagger!
Points of weakness
Pupils must sometimes work without help; there should be cooperation between teachers and parents of pupils.
Instruction are sometimes very long although pupils prefer shorter descriptions, they don´t like to read long articles, but if working at home, it is necessary to provide these long descriptions.
• Scientific reliability
I think, all is perfectly explained and students are led to make the best results. After every task should follow a session where everyone discusses the results and teacher corrects the mistakes.
• Pedagogic value
The pedagogic value is large. Students that are sick can work on experiments at home and without everyday consultation with the teacher.
Every teacher can use this web site and teachers can consult results together. The materials are very useful.