Making esters

October 25, 2017

We carried out a great lab in school today, making esters. Have you ever done this? What was good about it was that we used a good range of reagents and got some very different results. I set the class up with a range of alcohols and carboxylic acids and told them it...

Teaching optical isomers

October 2, 2017

I’ve just started to teach this topic to my students. It doesn’t take too long but I do find it an enjoyable topic to teach. But how do you teach it? I always warn the students that the topic is jargon heavy – the words / phrases used in the topic...

Putting your course together

August 30, 2017

This blog post is primarily aimed at teachers new to the course …. But that said, even if you are an experienced teacher it is always worth reviewing how you do things. There are always lots of things to consider when setting up the course. Do you teach by yourself or...

The new EE – How are you getting on?

August 2, 2017

The new extended essay (EE) guide has been out for a while now – how are you doing with it? Has it changed much in the way you set up and run your EE programme? From the chemistry side of things, I hope you have not seen many (if any changes). Students still need to...

Practical application of the ideal gas equation

June 28, 2017

How many moles of air are in your lab? What mass is this air? These are a couple of great questions you can set your students and ask them to come up with some answers using the ideal gas equation. You will need a barometer (to determine the air pressure), a...

Good Practice – Carrying out a lab

May 19, 2017

Here is an idea I got from a colleague of mine recently for a novel way of getting your students to plan a lab investigation. It is a model that could be rolled back and used in a variety of labs and it is very straightforward to do. Essentially, you give the students...