Week 1

Wow. First week was crazy. There’s too much to write down absolutely everything that happened, so I’ll include a highlight instead. On Friday I did the reactive metals demonstration. This is where you place metals like calcium, lithium, magnesium, and sodium into water and watch the reaction that takes place. Most of them fizz in the water while they react with it, creating a strong base in the water as well as hydrogen gas that bubbles off. Sodium in particular reacts vigorously enough that the hydrogen gas actually gets set on fire, making a nice flame that dances around the water bowl. After a few moments, just when the flame is starting to go out, it starts to spark and smoke like crazy. The students loved it because it  was so surprising and made a spectacular show (and kids love when things go up in flames and smoke in general!)

Relating this to UBC course work, I’m glad that I took the advice of my methods instructors and planned this demo only in relation to the class work we’ve been doing. I didn’t just do the demo because it made cool fireworks. I did it because it was directly related to the chemistry we were learning. The kids loved it, and it was really surprising to me how much they payed attention to the lesson during that class. I feel like it was because I started talking about how the reactions we just saw were related to the class work for the day. They now had something to relate to the lesson in a much more memorable way than notes. I hope this will help them make connections in their brains. After seeing this, I definitely would not do a demo for the class just because it was fun. Not because I don’t like fun, but because I have seen how much the students were able to take the energy from the demo and put it towards learning. Great experience!