Homeschool Science: Periodic Table of the Elements Resources

Quick Pick Six Elements with my ten-year-old. I miss those long-ago days of literally homeschooling around our big family room table!

Throughout our entire homeschooling journey, I always LOVED studying the Periodic Table of the Elements with the kids. And tbh, I don't know if we came back to it so often because it was really always coming up in our studies... or because I was always making an excuse to come back to it!

For instance, in that same homeschool year as the photo above, we studied the Periodic Table of the Elements as part of a chemistry unit, a geology unit, and a history of science study. We came back to it over the years every time studied biology, every time we studied geology, that one time that we did the history of science study... and this last homeschool year, my high school Senior and I took one last spin through the Periodic Table as part of her Honors Chemistry lab science.

You won't be surprised, then, to learn that I've amassed a lot of resources relating to the Periodic Table of the Elements. Here are some that we've used over the years:

We have worked this PTOE puzzle SO many times!

• Quick Pick Six Elements. I printed the playing cards on card stock and the kids colored them; I don't usually put that much effort into a handmade material, but we have used the snot out of this game! There are some other element flash cards that are already colored in available here.
• Interactive Periodic Table of the Elements. Click on one of the elements, and you can see images and descriptions. It's probably better for younger kids. This interactive Periodic Table of the Elements is better for older students.
• Periodic Table of Mistakes. After your kids have learned how the Periodic Table is organized, present them with this and see if they can spot all of the mistakes!
• PTOE Cookies. You know how we love baking delicious things for school! I really want to make cookies or cupcakes of the entire Periodic Table.
• Element Collection. How large of a collection can you accrue? I also think it would be fun to organize this as a scavenger hunt--how many elements do you already own?
• Lewis Dot Diagram of the Elements. Try this one instead of your standard Periodic Table.
• Build a Periodic Table of the Elements. Here's a big project for the semester--build your own wall-sized Periodic Table! If you don't need as much hand-holding, here's a free download that shows you how to set up this assignment.
• Egg Carton Periodic Table. Make your own Periodic Table of the Elements out of egg cartons.
• Periodic Table of Videos. TED-Ed has a lesson for every element in the Periodic Table.
• Cartoon Elements. Need your elements anthropomorphized? Here you go!
• PTOE Battleship. Here's a great way to get kids comfortable with pronouncing (or trying to pronounce!) the names of the elements.
• Periodic Table of the Elements Lapbook. My kids never got into lapbooks, although I do sometimes have them complete some of the smaller elements to include in the notebooks that they do keep.
• Chemical Element Trump Cards. Here's another card game, this one available as a free download.
• Element Coloring Pages. You can only get a few of the pages for free, but if your kiddo enjoys them, you could buy the book!
• Montessori Three-Part Cards of the Elements. A Montessori kid would adore these.
• Blank Table. Why not just write in your own?
• Cross-stitch Elements. This probably isn't for the kids, but I now deeply desire to make an entire cross-stitch Periodic Table of the Elements. Or maybe Perler beads?
• Cheater quilt. You can print the table, itself, onto quilting cotton via Spoonflower, and then sew it yourself, or use it as a beginner sewing project to do with the kids. Kids love hand-quilting! This one, on the other hand, is more of a patchwork sewing project, but you lose the element info. 
• Poster. We have always LOVED our large-format anchor charts over here. The bigger they are, the more room the kids have to draw and glue things all over them!

We also watch a lot of YouTube videos when we study something. When the kids were little I pre-screened videos before I watched with them, but I always had several go-to sources that I knew would be good. You might want to add these to your Watch List sooner rather than later, because you know how things are with YouTube--today's video is tomorrow's static!

And here are our FAVORITE favorite resources--THE BOOKS!!!!!!!!!

• The Illustrated Encyclopedia of the Elements
• The Disappearing Spoon
• The Stardust That Made Us
• The Periodic Table: A Visual Guide to the Elements
• The Secret Life of the Periodic Table
• The Periodic Table: Elements with Style
• The Elements Book: A Visual Encyclopedia of the Periodic Table

Although all my kids are officially done with all of their homeschool studies as of this week, you're probably still going to find me doing my own little PTOE crafts now and then. I want to find a way to make a Periodic Table quilt that is both patchwork AND has the info for each element, for instance... I guess when both the kids go off to college in the fall, my partner and I can spend our lonely evenings designing element quilt blocks for Spoonflower to print for me!

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Homeschool High School Chemistry: A Historical and Artistic Look at the Periodic Tables of the Elements

Twenty-ish years ago, when I was studying for my Master's in Library Science, I took a class entitled The Organization and Representation of Knowledge and Information.

It was... just as fussy and pedantic of a class as you'd imagine from the title. I thought my instructor was fussy and pedantic, I thought the structure of the assignments was fussy and pedantic, and after two or three years of English grad school by that time, I found the endless class debates over the philosophy of how to organize and represent some specific piece of knowledge or information to be just the worst kind of parody of grad school education.

I just looked, and the school DOES still offer that exact class, but the syllabus is completely different! It looks so practical now! I might have come out of that class with a genuinely marketable skill, dang it!

ANYWAY, I was not my best self in that class (actually, I might have been in the early stages of pregnancy in that class, now that I think if it. Wonder if that had anything to do with my mindset, ahem?), and the only thing that I really remember from it is that there are infinite ways to organize and represent knowledge and information. The trick is to figure out the best one!

So when my teenager and I took what I knew would be the last of our numerous pass-throughs of the Periodic Table of the Elements this past school year, I decided to shake up our usual look at the Table as an unquestioned artifact by instead exploring its history, and some of the MANY variations the structure has taken in the quest to find the absolutely most perfect iteration. 

This was a great topic to move into soon after our lesson on alchemy, because scientists have been trying to organize the elements since before the only elements were earth, air, water, and fire! Here's one of the beautiful tables that we looked at first:

Tria Prima image via Mark R. Leach

Most of our Periodic Tables were taken from the Internet Database of Periodic Tables run by Mark R. Leach. With every table that we looked at, it was interesting to discuss why that table was arranged the way it was--what organizational problems it tried to solve, what patterns it tried to create--as well as what organizational issues that table caused, leading to yet another iteration. And of course one mustn't neglect the artistic merits of each table!

The teenager and I are both hands-on learners, so, for instance, we both liked this table from 1814:

Wollaston's Physical Slide Rule of Chemical Equivalents image via Mark R. Leach

It's a Periodic Table because it's ordered based on the weights of the elements, but you can see why it would be somewhat impractical for many purposes. What schoolchild could afford it? Who could manage carrying it around for ready reference?

Emerson's Helix from 1911 is prettier, and much more practical to put one's hands on:

Emerson's Helix image via Mark R. Leach

But you can already see it's not going to work with as many elements as we have today.

THIS Periodic Table of the Elements, though--THIS one really gets into the meat of what personally interests me about how the elements are organized:

Rare Earth Pop Out Periodic Table image via Mark R. Leach

There is just not a practical way--one that also makes sense!--to get all those elements into one nice, neat, lined-up table. Something always wants to stick out!

I really like this 3D pyramid from 1983; it's organized so that each side represents one type of atomic orbital... mostly. 

Or you can organize the elements based on your own usage of them: this 3D cube has the elements sized "in approximate proportion to their importance in cement chemistry."

And to be honest, I can't work out how this table from 2008 even works, or how one is meant to read it:

Angular Form of the Periodic Table image via Mark R. Leach

It's VERY pretty, though! I would happily work it as a puzzle!

Since, alas, we do not have an Angular Form of the Periodic Table puzzle, we happily reworked our good old 1,000-piece PTOE puzzle that we've reworked many times before--

I had thought that it might interest the teenager to create an art piece organizing the elements in any unique way that she chose--a Minecraft creation, perhaps, or a menagerie. A PowerPoint organized by vibes. A series of ceramic vessels. She wasn't feeling inspired by the prompt, though--it's possible that I've brought up the PTOE maybe a couple of too many times over the past 12 years, ahem--and part of the fun of being a homeschooler who chooses your own adventures is also NOT choosing adventures, so an artistic, unique Periodic Table did not become part of her Art of Chemistry portfolio.

Instead, we colored ourselves anchor charts of the table that we've all agreed to know and love today, internalizing, as we did, how this particular knowledge and information is organized and represented:

While we worked we listened to The Disappearing Spoon on audiobook, because I'll be damned if I don't sneak in just a LITTLE more Periodic Table content before this last year of homeschooling ends!

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Alchemy: A High School Chemistry/Geometry/World History Combo Study

We use CK-12's Chemistry for High School textbook as the teenager's spine for Honors Chemistry, with, of course, our own lab component added and a LOT of supplementation. 

We started supplementing right in Chapter 1, when we added a short study of alchemy to the textbook's brief history of chemistry.

I think that most teenagers find the concept of alchemy interesting--it's mystical and a little spooky, and it's very, very incorrect. Teenagers have SO much fun learning about adults who were incorrect!

Unfortunately, there really aren't a ton of great resources about alchemy that work well for a high school/undergrad readership, and there are a TON of contemporary, fantastical, and otherwise ahistorical resources that muddy up any kind of student-led research. 

Therefore, this study of alchemy was necessarily a short one, able to be completed within 1-2 hours. You could draw out the art component further, of course, by requiring a more polished piece that used a larger vocabulary of alchemical symbols and moves, but this brief afternoon's work was enough for our own purposes.

After reading the relevant material in the CK-12 Chemistry for High School textbook, my teenager and I watched this Crash Course History of Science episode (if your student isn't studying History of Science as a discrete topic, I highly recommend reviewing the playlist and adding applicable videos to their science/history syllabi as interdisciplinary enrichment):

Crash Course videos tend to be meaty, so it might be worth going over it a couple of times to make sure you absorb all the info.

After the video, my teenager and I looked through a number of alchemical illustrations and excerpts from alchemy books from alchemy's heyday. This Getty Research Institute's virtual exhibit is a treasure! Click on the link in the caption of most of the images to be taken to the digitized version of that book, which you can then flip through to find other interesting images and text. 

The teenager practiced her close reading to notice all the details in each piece of artwork, and used semiotic analysis to attempt to interpret the pieces. But also take time to notice how lovely each piece, is, as well; alchemy artwork is ART!

Using these pieces and some reference books, we then spent some time playing around with creating our own artwork that had (or looked like it had, lol!), alchemical meaning. The nature of the pieces also meant that the teenager could use the works she created as process pieces in her geometry art portfolio: 

Check out the accurate geometric shapes and the overall balance of the piece! DON'T check out my noisy digitization of the work; I really need to learn how to clean up art when I scan it, sigh...

That was as far as we took this particular lesson, but here's some further reading appropriate for an interested high school student:

• Alchemy: The Great Secret. This is a fairly accessible history for those who watched the Crash Course video but would like to learn more.
• Alchemy: An Illustrated A to Z. I wouldn't use this as a textbook supplement, but it was an excellent art reference. 
• Alchemy and Mysticism: The Hermetic Museum. Most of the text was beyond me, but it has tons of art to reference.

My favorite thing about alchemy is how it sits just next to being correct; like, they were wrong about the Sun and the Moon and dragon's blood and the mystical marriage of lead and tin, but while they were drawing their allegorical wedding feasts and busily melting silver in little pots, they were butting up against the actual chemistry that alchemy would evolve into. What they did reads now as adorably naive just because we know better, but these people were actually pretty bad-ass wizard scientists.

They also for sure all had lead poisoning, which explains a LOT of their artwork.

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Homeschool Science: Model Chemosynthesis with Zometools

Earlier this summer, the kids and I worked through a brief Yellowstone National Park study that had us spiraling back to a favorite activity: modeling chemical processes with Zometools!

As part of that Yellowstone study, the kids and I looked at thermophiles, those heat-loving bacteria and archaea that make their happy homes in the different high heat zones of the park's hots springs. Some thermophiles, including these thermophilic archaea at Yellowstone, have a metabolism that uses chemosynthesis. It's cool and unusual, makes an interesting contrast to photosynthesis, and--just like photosynthesis!--you can model it with Zometools!

For our chemosynthesis model, we decided that our organism would be oxidizing hydrogen sulfide. There are other organisms that start with not hydrogen sulfide, but chemicals like methane or sulfide, and it would be another interesting project to model and compare various chemosynthesis pathways.

Syd used this chemosynthesis formula on the NOAA website as her reference, although when Will, who was reviewing the photosynthesis formula at the time, tried to use that same NOAA site as her reference, she discovered that the photosynthesis formula written there is incorrect! GASP!

You will be unsurprised to learn that I contacted their webmaster to inform them of the error.

One of the interesting challenges in modeling a chemical formula is figuring out the correct way to assemble each molecule:

This is frustrating for students who would rather assemble, say, hydrogen sulfide "their" way, ahem...

 Looking each chemical compound up, though, will generally also help you figure out its common name. H2S, for instance, is known as hydrogen sulfide. You probably already know that CO2 is carbon dioxide, but maybe you didn't know that O2 is called dioxygen:

So this chemosynthesis formula begins with hydrogen sulfide, carbon dioxide, and dioxygen. The fuel for the change is the oxidation of the hydrogen sulfide. This source of energy allows all of the compounds to convert--

--into sulfur, water, and formaldehyde!

Good thing THIS isn't what plants do--you wouldn't want to try to breathe formaldehyde!

I think it's important, when kids study processes like photosynthesis, to make sure they understand right from the start that there are other ways for organisms to synthesize energy. You don't want a rigid scientific thinker, who can't imagine any other way for an organism to flourish. You want a creative thinker who can look at the surface and atmosphere of an alien planet and immediately start thinking of all the ways that an organism could use those formidable chemicals and that unusual energy to live!

P.S. Want to follow along with all the other ways that I insert the search for alien life into our homeschool? Check out my Craft Knife Facebook page for photos, resources, and other bits of the weird stuff we do all day.