Chemistry classroom Hands

Runyan adds, "Every time I attend a Partners meeting, the other teachers and I have brain explosions of our own. The teachers, the Partners staff, and the industry people have so many fantastic ideas about implementing and using all of these hands-on activities. I get a big morale boost when I know the community and industry support what I do in the classroom. I m pleased that an industry such as Armco cares enough to use their own resources and the expertise of their people to help me implement the teaching of chemistry and hands-on science."... 

Even though it is fun to learn chemistry in the classroom with the use of a textbook, nothing beats the hands-on laboratory experience ... 

The Solutions in Green Chemistry and Recipe for Sustainable Science units have been developed to reach students of all levels and abilities. The units target those students who have come to think that science is not for them and students to which science has not captured their imaginations. The units are designed to be hands-on and allow students to use their creativity within sound scientific principles. Both units are also available in Spanish for the use in other countries and for the ESL populations in U.S. schools that typically get very little science content in their education. Students will come away from the units with an alternative view of science that relates to their daily lives and teachers will learn how to apply Green Chemistry and sustainability to their own classroom activities. 

Curriculum development at the K-12 level goes hand-and-hand with teacher training. The development of green chemistry curriculum materials must involve collaboration between the green chemistry researchers and the K-12 teacher. Several approaches have been found to be effective in developing curriculum, which can be applied in the K-12 classroom. 

We still keep a significant emphasis on the experimental aspects of chemistry. We aim for about equal time between lectures and laboratories or demonstrations. With the help of a local high school teacher who had taken the course earlier, we revised most of the experiments in the labs to provide more hands-on experiments which could be readily used in a typical classroom situation. This means using chemicals which are readily available and can be handled safely without excessive caution, avoiding unusual equipment, and... 

A high school teacher, carrying out a chemistry demonstration, was using methanol with some chemical salts when a sudden explosion occurred that burned several students in the front row. Three students received serious burns to their faces, necks, arms, hands, and legs. The other students in the classroom ran from the room. Media reported that there was a lack of safety oversight that is common in many schools and inspections are rare. 

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