Welcome to my journey to becoming and being a teacher. In my blog, you'll see the different lessons and ideas that I use in my classroom. I hope that blog is used as a tool for first time teachers worldwide. More importantly, I hope that it is used as a tool for both parents and students.
Mondays are always a really short class. This Monday was not much different. For today, I decided to teach students the easy way to do electron configuration. Now, of course they don't feel that this is always easy. However, it is much easier than trying to memorize the arrow diagram.
I'm going to be really honest here. When I showed it to them the first time I got a lot of confused looks. I had to reteach it because I felt that I didn't teach it properly the first time around. How it is explained in the rest of this blog is how I taught it the second time around.
To start, we need to have our best friend, The Periodic Table of Elements. (Really, go get one right now!)
Okay, so first I had my students label each part of their periodic table. Group 1 and 2 both should have the s orbital on top. Group 13-18 (minus Helium) should be labeled with a p. Group 3-12 (Transition metals) should be labeled with d-1. And the Lanthanides and Actinides are labeled f-2. Like this:
Once the students have labeled their period table, we select an element. I like to pick one from the d orbitals simply because d is where students begin to get confused.
After picking the element, we circle it. Circling seems to show students exactly where they need to end up. Let's say in our case we select Iron. If you look at the Periodic Table, it should be element 26.
I told the kids, it's like going over to someone's house. You can't just cut across streets even though it's right behind your house, you have to just take the streets over to the house whether you're walking, driving, or biking. Let's start the beginning of the Periodic Table.
At this point, students have numbered each period on their Periodic Table. We can use this for energy level as well. Let's start. The first step where Hydrogen is at is our starting position. What energy level is that? 1. Now, what orbital is it in? s. Okay, we have 1s. How many electrons in an s orbital? Two. That's Hydrogen and Helium. We took 2 steps. We now have 1s to the 2nd power. 1s^2. Are we at Iron yet? No. We're only at Helium! Let's go down. Energy level? Orbital? How many steps? 2s^2. Beryllium. If we go across the periodic table we hit Boron. Energy level? Orbital? How many steps? 2p^6. So on and so forth. It's a little hard to explain over a blog. What I will be trying to do is uploading videos on how to do this. However, that's not something I have yet.
Once we completed this explanation, light bulbs seemed to go off everywhere! I took this opportunity to hand out the electron configuration practice worksheet that will be turned in and an additional worksheet that will be extra credit. You can find that on my Resources page
Again, because Mondays are really short, we don't get through a lot during the day. The rest of the time, I let my students work on the electron configuration while I walked around trying to help.
That's all I have for you today! Join me next time on the Nerdy Teacher's Corner!
Welcome back to the Nerdy Teacher's Corner scientists!
Today we will spending time applying some of the concepts we learned during last class.
To start off, I have placed whiteboards around the class. One for each table. We start up by working out the electron configuration for Titanium. They can use their notes to help. I walk around and look at what the kids are coming up, but don't really tell them if they're right or wrong.
One of the biggest misconceptions I notice is that students are confusing the orbital box diagram with electron configuration. For others, they are drawing both. Somewhere in the explanation of the lesson last class confused students. However, on a great positive note, students are obtaining the correct orbital diagram and the correct electron configuration.
As everyone finishes up, we do discuss exactly what I was looking for.
In hindsight, I wish I had asked them to refer back to their interactive notebooks and they tell me what the orbital box diagram is versus the electron configuration. In this way, students would know why their answer was incorrect rather than me telling them.
To continue, we have done a warmup. This particular warmup will be written on pg. 51 so they have an example. In this case, I have asked them to write the electron configuration of a different element. As we review, students are much more confident in their answers knowing exactly the difference between an orbital diagram and electron configuration.
Once we completed this, I gave them a worksheet with practice on orbital diagrams and electron configuration. I only give them about 15 minutes to work on this. They will not be able to do the last part of the worksheet which goes into the Noble Gas Configuration. We have not covered this yet.
For the last 50 minutes of class, we will be doing an activity that will count as a lab grade. The lab is called Quantum Mechanics and Split Peas. I have put that on my Resources page. I have put the link below.
In this simulation, students will be taking split peas or lentils, put them through a funnel, and drop them into a target. They will count the number of peas that fall in each area, and graph the data. As you notice on the lab, there are questions students must answer. The data they obtain creates a probability graph on where the peas should land. It simulates how the quantum mechanical model works. Of course, it doesn't simulate exactly, but it does convey the idea in a more concrete way.
Now, to be successful in this lab, there are a few key points. The funnel should be positioned no more than 10 centimeters above the target. We noticed that if we did this higher than 10 cm, then the peas would mostly land in area 6. There wasn't really an even distribution. The height provides too much kinetic energy in the peas and causes them to bounce farther out. I had my kids create paper funnels because the funnels we had, the hole was too small for the peas to go through nicely. Finally, there are instructions to hold the the opening of the funnel and not let go until all the peas are in the funnel. We noticed that if you didn't do this, the peas tended to stay around area 6. This didn't create a nice bell graph like we wanted to. Below is the graph we expect to see if we control these different things.
I realize that these are a lot of little modifications, but we wanted the simulation to be realistic to the quantum mechanical model. If we didn't take these steps, we would just see a straight line graph. This simulation went very quickly. This gave students the opportunity to take time to finish the analysis in class. Most of my kids were able to finish the entire lab and analysis. However, I still gave them until Monday to finish it up if they did not finish today. One thing I will mention is that question 4 on the analysis is something I would like to change. I was looking for my students to realize that with 40 mL of peas, they should not see a difference in having a bell graph. The only difference they would see is that the numbers would increase per area.
Welcome back to the Nerdy Teacher's Corner scientists!
Today is a huge day! Students will be covering The Quantum Mechanical Model which is the most accurate model of the atom to date. It is also the most abstract and difficult for students to understand. To be honest, I'm a little nervous!
First things first. We need the PowerPoint presentation for The Quantum Mechanical Model.
That can be found on my Resources page. Resources
This presentation is actually pretty lengthy. This was the presentation my mentor used last year. Unfortunately, we will only go up to Slide 45. You will see in farther slides that we would do Periodic Table Battleship. We didn't get to that, sadly. It's sad for me because I really would have liked to see that in action!
To start off the lesson, I have my students draw the Bohr Diagram for Neon-21. This starts off a great discussion with isotopes, which they haven't seen since last semester. Eventually students realize that it doesn't change much in their Bohr diagram except the number of neutrons. We write the neutrons in the middle of the diagram.
Say hello to Louis de Broglie!
As we begin to discuss this subject, I talk about how de Broglie began to use the theory that light behaves as both a particle and a wave. Could electrons behave as both a wave and a particle? Hmmm. This is where the Quantum Mechanical Model stems from. How do scientists prove that an electron behaves as both a wave and a particle? Uhhh...well there-in lies the hard part. Check out this video! It will explain the struggle with explaining what we're dealing with.
The double slit experiment confirms that the electron behaves as both a wave and a particle. But, every time we try to observe the electron behave a certain way, it behaves differently. I told my students, that the electron behaves a lot like my dog does. I see my dog doing this really cute thing. I run to get my cell phone because it would be awesome if I caught this in a picture or a video. What does my adorable dog do? He does the thing I wasn't expecting him to do. It's not that cute thing I wanted on video. It's him just staring at me. Which is, of course, still adorable, but not what I wanted or expected. It's almost like he knew I was observing his absolute cuteness. *sigh*
That's the electron!
This begins to relate to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. (Yes, this is where Walter White from Breaking Bad got the name from!) The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle tells us that we can predict the velocity (speed and direction) and position of the electron, but we can never say 100% for sure where it is. The electron is everywhere, but nowhere all at the same time!
Yup. Same facial expression that my kids give me. How is that possible? Schrodinger's Wave Equation produces the math (evidence) that shows the probability of finding an electron at any given distance from the nucleus. We can say that the electron exists in a cloud. The movement is so fast that it creates this cloud. The way I explained it to my kids is like this.
In the summer, we have separate fans because our swamp cooler doesn't cool as well as refrigerated air does. My boyfriend's son loves having these fans around. Mostly, because he likes to play with them. He does that thing that every kid likes to do. He sticks his fingers through the blades while they're spinning. Sometimes he makes it without getting hit. But, about 95% of the time he doesn't make it, the fan makes a weird noise, and he gets yelled at. We can think of the Quantum Mechanical Model like that! If you look at the fan a certain way, you think you know exactly where each blade is at. However, if we think about it, do we know with 100% certainty where the blade is at any given moment? No, but we can definitely predict with a pretty good estimate, right?
Another way we can look at it is like this. I show my students this image.
There's a 90% probability that we can say where the electron is at. I ask my students, "If your parents wanted to know where you were at like 1:25 pm, they would assume you are in class, right? They're probably 90% sure where you are. However, there's the 10% chance that they don't know what period/class you're in or maybe that you happened to ditch (hopefully, you wouldn't be doing that!)." The same goes for the electron. You can predict where it is and you'd be correct 90% of the time. But, there is always that 10% chance you'd be wrong.
Once we go through the background on how this theory came to be, students start filling in the worksheets they've glued in on pg. 63 and pg. 64 of their interactive notebooks. We will work on this as a class and it takes the place of their Cornell Notes.
This is where we begin to go into quantum numbers and electron configuration. Quantum numbers give us an "address" for a given electron. For our purposes, we do not go into too much detail with quantum numbers. We only focus on size and energy level, shape, and spin. For size/energy level, I show them that numbers are related to size. The higher the number, the bigger the circle. For 1s (Energy level 1, don't focus on the s yet. We will get to that) is smaller than 2s (Energy level 2).
Now, we can explain the shape and I have them draw that on their worksheet. This is an image on what they'll be doing for that particular worksheet.
Ultimately, we go into orbitals, how many electrons are in an orbital, and we tie everything to Bohr. At the bottom of the worksheet, you can see how we look at energy levels individually. When you add up the total number of orbitals and number of electrons per orbital type, you see the total number of electrons per principal energy level. It equals the number of electrons in each orbit in the Bohr diagram!
It's so beautiful to hear the OHHHHHH!!!! come from their mouths. Although the Bohr diagram only accurately explains Hydrogen, Bohr did have the right idea on how the atom behaves. He just wasn't 100% there!
We move on to the electron configuration help sheet. This worksheet has the different rules that electrons follow. They don't position themselves randomly wherever they want. This worksheet will lead us into drawing the orbital diagrams.
These rules are extremely important for many things we will be doing from here on out. I'm not really concerned on whether students memorize the names. I would rather focus on them knowing what the rules do. Add electrons one at a time starting at the lowest energy level, opposite spins in each orbital, and electrons want to be by themselves first, then they pair up. This will spill into Lewis dot structures and bonding in later units.
At this time, I give students a little break from this intensive lesson. I have them pick up two additional worksheets that they will glue on pg. 65 and 66 of their interactive notebook. These are titled Electron Configuration Arrows (pg.65) and Orbital Aufbau (pg. 66) diagram. Here is the resources link again if you need it. Resources
After about five minutes, we continue to finish up for the day. We work on a couple examples first then allow the kids to work one for themselves. I start with Carbon. I noticed that my students really like when thing are done systematically. We start by writing down how many electrons the particular element we are talking about has. We then use arrows to denote electrons and fill in the boxes using the 3 different rules we've learned about. We start at the lowest energy level first (Aufbau principle) which is 1s. 1s only has 1 orbital. We draw one arrow up and one arrow down (Pauli exclusion principle). Then we can move on to 2s. One orbital again, so we draw one arrow up and one arrow down. However, when we get to 2p, p has 3 orbitals. We draw only two arrows up unpaired. This is because of Hund's rule. Electrons want to be by themselves before they pair up. In this image, the correct orbital diagram is the third one.
We practice writing down the orbital diagrams flat (left to right) because they save room on paper. Electron configuration is also determined from here. This is where we introduce the arrow diagram. Students tend to struggle on what comes next. Especially when we start getting into the d orbitals. If students follow the arrows, they will know what to write next.
So, 1s 2s 2p 3s 3p 4s 3d 4p 5s etc! I explain to students that the superscripts above the s,p,d,f orbitals represent number of electrons. We started learning that s orbitals can only have two electrons because they only have 1 orbital. The p can hold 6 electrons because it has 3 orbitals. So on and so forth. After completing these examples, with the last 10-12 minutes left in class, I ask them to work on two more examples on their pg. 66 worksheet.
This lesson is pretty intense. However, we seemed to have managed to get through it!
Until next time! Join me at the Nerdy Teacher's Corner!
Mondays are usually a short day. We only meet with our class for roughly 30-40 minutes depending on whether we have advisory or not. This particular Monday we did. For today's blog, I'd like to talk a little bit about what Advisory is (because it was new to me) and what we covered in class today.
First things first, I showed my kids grades. I like to keep them updated on grades so that they can continue to push forward.
Our school uses Synergy. I, personally, like Synergy. There is a Teacher Vue, Student Vue, and Teacher Vue. Teacher Vue is where you as a teacher plug in grades, add assignments, take attendance, see student IEP's, 504 Plans, allergies, contact information, and more! I really like having access to that information because it allows me to stay knowledgeable on my student's needs and I can contact parents if needed. Also, it is an active gradebook. Once you post grades, they go live for the students to see. Student Vue is what the students see. I'm not 100% sure what else they can see besides their grades. I will update as soon as I talk to my students. Parent Vue is useful for parents too! They can see what assignments their children are missing. It keeps them involved in what is going on in class. However, I'm hoping this blog will help parents with more details. Again, with Parent Vue, I'm not 100% how much they get to see besides grades.
When I showed students their grades, I talked about how they did on their Wave worksheet. I graded them over the weekend and noticed there were excellent grades across the board. I praised them for how they did, but also expressed a concern. Now, some students will just copy work to get the grade. I get that. My concern is that if students do this, eventually it's going to catch up to them when it comes to test time. If they copied, they may not know how to do the work. I expressed that concern with them, but praised the great grades if that was not the case.
For the rest of the time in class, I had my students glue two sheets to their interactive notebooks. These would go to pg. 63 and 64. We will be beginning the Quantum Mechanical Model (also known as the Electron Cloud Model) tomorrow and gluing these sheets in will save some time on covering material. If you need these worksheets, you can find them in my Resources page. They are titled Electrons in Orbitals and Electron Configuration Help Sheet. These will be used in place of Cornell Notes.
Finally, in this blog, I want to discuss a little bit of what Advisory is. Advisory is usually added on Mondays and it shortens the usually 45 minute classes to 30 minutes. Advisory is added on as a class for students (Period 10). Sometimes they will be students you have in your classes, but this isn't always the case. This is one of the downfalls because during this class students schedule student led conferences. Now, if the Advisory teacher doesn't know all their students, it's hard to have a conference with parents on what students need. Advisory isn't offered very much so there isn't enough time to really get to know those students you don't normally have in your classes. One of the things that was great about this Advisory is that students had the chance to look at their transcripts and figure out what classes they needed for next semester. They were able to see how many credits they had (electives, language arts, language, science, math, etc.) and had an idea on what specific classes they would be taking for next year.
