This is a lab activity where the students group the given elements as metals, nonmetals or metalloids.

How elements relate to atoms. The basics of how protons, electrons, and neutrons make up an atom. Created by Sal Khan.

This lab is designed to be a highly interactive lab session for a petrology course, where instructors provide a minimal level of essential background and then the entire group works together to explore mineral chemistry. In using a new piece of technology, students can "learn as they go." The point is not to understand every aspect of how an instrument works or to become proficient users, but rather to use the visual impact of the output to catch their interest and advance their analytical skills in the process. I find this lab works very well as a bridge between two semesters of a typical Mineralogy-Petrology sequence. Having completed crystallography, systematic mineralogy and optical, students find this a welcome change of pace and it helps them to start thinking about how mineral associations form the basis of petrology. It is also a great reinforcement and integration of mineralogy and chemistry, allowing you to leap off into crystal chemistry more deeply.

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In this 8th grade science lesson, students review the six essential elements of life and discuss how they function in the garden.

This course deals with inorganic and physical chemistry. The study of the structure of atoms, the periodic nature of the elements, and the examination of the relationship of energy and the elements to form compounds and the three physical states of matter will be investigated.

Students are given major-element, whole-rock chemical analyses from ten samples of lava from the 1868 eruption of Mauna Loa. They do not know sequence of eruption, only that the lavas came from the same volcano. Students are asked to evaluate the hypothesis that the observed chemical variation is due to the fractional crystallization of olivine. The hypothesis can be tested any of a number of graphs. Several examples are given in the accompanying Excel workbook.

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This homework has 2 main parts: In the first part, students are given bulk compositions for 6 volcanic rocks and asked to classify them, think about their normative compositions, and given likely tectonic settings for three of them. In the second part, they work with a complex binary phase diagram. In this part, they must think about components vs. phases, the lever rule, behavior at a peritectic point, and fractional removal of a phase. After completing this homework, I find that students are comfortable working with any binary diagram I give them.

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Inorganic chemistry is concerned with the properties and reactivity of all chemical elements. Advanced interests focus on understanding the role of metals in biology and the environment, the design and properties of materials for energy and information technology, fundamental studies on the reactivity of main group and transition elements, and nanotechnology. Synthetic efforts are directed at hydrogen storage materials and thermoelectrics, catalysts for solar hydrogen generation, fullerenes and metal porphyrins, metal clusters and compounds with element-element bonds, as well as nanowires and nanoparticles.

This activity is a guided inquiry laboratory in which students perform reactions involving metals and hydrochloric acid in order to determine their activity series.

Are all atoms of an element the same? How can you tell one isotope from another? Use the sim to learn about isotopes and how abundance relates to the average atomic mass of an element.

Freshmen enrolled in the Spaceship Earth Living Learning Community conduct research on a real project that is formulated and conducted during a 2-semester academic year.

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This exercise is centered around a suite of rocks from the Sierra Nevada batholith. The activities are designed to give petrology students a capstone experience for the igneous portion of the upper-level Petrology course. Students are given thin sections with hand samples, a map and a table of geochemical analyses (in Excel format) and asked to record hand-sample and thin section observations with the idea that these will be used to understand processes that were active during batholith generation. By the time they encounter this lab, the students have spent at least 7 lab periods looking at a variety of igneous rocks and their textures. Because students are given geochemical analyses, they are also expected to experiment with the use of graphs (e.g., Harker and spider diagrams) to better understand tables of geochemical analyses. The students use observations about rocks and geochemistry to build a coherent story around these rocks; the final product is a short paper in which they use petrographic observations and geochemical diagrams to back up their interpretations.

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The presentation is an introduction to the control of magma chemical compositions by the fractionation of crystallizing phases. It is followed by a lab exercise where students interpret volcanic rock petrology and a geochemical data set (from Iceland) in terms of sequences of fractionating phases.

It is a useful as an introduction because it shows clearly, with data points, interpreted lines, and oral explanation how fractionating crystals can, in principal, control the chemical composition of derivative magmas.

In context, this presentation is shown after phase diagram lectures and exercises, and it is linked to them by examining phase diagrams that illustrate the crystallization sequence (Olivine-plagioclase-augite). Further, a following lab exercise has the students deduce somewhat similar crystal fractionation controls for a set of Iceland lavas (for phenocryst petrology) and geochemical data sets (with which control lines are plotted).

The presentation itself is not enough to make the connection between liquid composition changes, phase diagrams, and chemistry, but in the context of earlier phase diagrams, presentation, return to phase diagrams, and the petrology-geochemistry Iceland exercise, it helps get across the idea of how crystal fractionation can control magma evolution.

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This problem set introduces some of the more advanced uses of Excel to not only calculate how the chemistry of a magma changes with crystallization but also to see how the liquidus assemblage can drastically change the evolution of the remaining magma. Once they have their calculations complete, students plot the results and answer questions on the geochemical trends observed through the crystallization sequence. This problem set reinforces quantitative problem solving skills using a spreadsheet and has the students think about mineralogical controls on magma evolution.

This exercise is modified from one that Clark Johnson assigned at University of Wisconsin. I find this exercise to be more instructive for some of the tricks and tools in Excel, but there are some interesting questions that can derive from it. This assignment is often the first time the light goes on that you can end up with different composition magmas depending on what minerals are crystallizing, and that depends on the pressure of crystallization. There are many more questions that could be asked, such as where does this model fall short? What could be added or considered to make this a more realistic simulation of fractionation (more trace elements or REE).

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The NAVDAT project is compiling existing age, chemical, and isotopic data from Late Cretaceous to Holocene extrusive and intrusive igneous rocks from the western United States, British Columbia, and northern Mexico into a web-accessible electronic database. NAVDAT will be integrated into a geographic information system (GIS) to allow visualization of complex age-compositional patterns in volcanism throughout the study region. The addition of necessary relational and graphical tools will allow users of the database to address a wide variety of issues concerning the geologic evolution and present volcanic state of western North America.

This video segment adapted from NOVA explains the origin of the elements and how scientists use unique element profiles to identify supernova types.

In this lab exercise, students use and substantial spreadsheet of major, minor and trace element data compiled from studies of the Dinkey Creek pluton (Sierra Nevada batholith) and its microgranular mafic enclaves. The use of the Excel Add-in Petroplot is a must for this exercise to save time. The Petroplot Add-in and its instructions can be found at the following web site: Petroplot Add-in

Some familiarity with Excel is assumed. I've included a handout introducing the problem and discussing mafic enclaves in the Sierra Nevada batholith. Pictures of typical enclaves are provided and can be dumped into Powerpoint for lecture purposes. Several questions [and answers] about to the student-produced graphs are included, but certainly are not exhaustive. The utility of the exercise is to familiarize students with major and trace element discrimination diagrams and spreadsheet databases as tools to consider if magma mixing can explain the origin of the mafic enclaves in this pluton.

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This template is meant to be a guide for Nebraska Teachers when creating Units of Instruction for the BlendEd Best Practices Project. Headings and/or topics not included in the lesson plan should be marked N/A.

This interactive periodic table developed for Teachers' Domain provides detailed information about the chemical properties of elements and illustrates the electron configurations that determine those characteristics.