Evaluating your IA programme

January 30, 2020

The ‘new’ IB chemistry course is now in its fifth year. With this in mind, when was the last time you evaluated your IA programme? Is it time for a rethink? Have you settled into a routine that is more of a compromise as opposed to a system them works for you and your...

Primo Levi

November 13, 2019

The aim of this post is to give you some ideas for furthering your teaching of the international dimension. You may or may not heard of Primo Levi. I came across his name recently when carrying out some research into graphene. The name seemed unusual to me and I...

Silver chemistry

October 30, 2019

Silver offers some interesting opportunities to do something different with your teaching. You may teach about it / include it when you are looking at the halogens or when covering redox reactions. I hope this blog post gives you some ideas. If you are including some...

Hydrogen

July 10, 2019

We are currently having a space themed week in school to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the moon landings. not quite the 50th anniversary, more like 49 and 49/50ths (Armstrong walked on the lunar surface on the 16th July 1969) but as we break up on Friday it was...

Using Catalysts in Lab Work – a Slightly Different Approach

June 28, 2019

I imagine that, as teachers, we all carry out a hydrogen peroxide decomposition using manganese dioxide. We may also demo cracking where we use aluminium oxide or silicon oxide as a catalyst. This aside, do we really make much use of catalysts in our lab work?...

Colorimetry

June 5, 2019

I love carrying out colorimetry, it is one of my favorite types of labs to carry out and I do believe that as teachers, it is a really underused type of lab and undervalued type of lab. I always teach the theory first, covering the ideas behind the Beer-Lambert Law...