Creative Chemistry Teaching

I’m always impressed by creative teaching ideas. Here’s one I encountered the other day, for chemistry.

My wife is working on a project to create custom chemistry-based tee shirts and so on through Zazzle. On day, we noticed someone had bought a collection of fifty fridge magnets, each one showing the chemical symbol for ‘Carbon’. Immediately, I thought “what an amazingly great teaching technique!”.

I had visions of an organic chemistry teacher somewhere, sticking dozens of fridge magnets onto a whiteboard – then rearranging them to show various chemical reactions. This seems to me like a great way to bring organic chemistry to life.

Creative teaching finds ways to grab the students’ attention. To make things visual or practical, not just auditory. To engage, not just demonstrate. Educational games are one way to do some of this, but as the fridge magnet example shows, there are many many other ways.

If you know a chemistry teachers who loves to be creative in their teaching, please do refer them to this blog post. Links to various chemical element fridge magnets follow :

• Carbon
• Oxygen
• Hydrogen
• Nitrogen
• Phosphorus
• Sulphur
• Sodium
• Chlorine
• The whole kit and kaboodle