Science: Daily Lessons

This is the final post detailing our curriculum choices for this year. Next week, I’ll start sharing specific unit plans and how well they went (or spectacularly crashed, as the case may be).

We’re spending the first semester on Chemistry, complete with all the mixing and explosions that it may include. Middle school science can be very bookish, due to the logistics of setting up labs in limited space with limited time and unlimited middle school student energy. I wanted a different experience for my son. Fortunately, the American Chemical Society offers a free curriculum with a lab and videos for each lesson.  You'll need to purchase materials for some of the labs, but they are cheap and easy to obtain. In fact, we already had most of them.

Each unit starts with a relatively short reading assignment explaining the new concepts. Then, there are about five lessons per unit complete with explanations, labs and teacher demos. What I’m seeing so far is that even the most basic lab helps solidify or clear up basic chemistry facts.  The six units are:

1.       Matter – Solids, Liquids, and Gases

2.       Changes of State

3.       Density

4.       The Periodic Table and Bonding

5.       The Water Molecule and Dissolving

6.       Chemical Change

I added units on balancing equations and directly comparing physical and chemical changes. We supplement with vocabulary from BrainPop and a few Crash Course Chemistry videos.  Then, to end the semester, my son will go on multiple field trips to Dad’s chemical plant to see all this science in action.