Use ideas from this issue

Covid-secure teaching ideas

• A teacher-only demo to fire up students – by using water to light a match. Ideal for discussing the properties of water or enthalpy
• Get disengaged learners back on track by reflecting on their learning at home and help them turn their reflections into actions
• Worried about back-to-school behaviour? Transform your classroom behaviour culture with these ideas
• How to write effective questions for formative assessment
• Which technologies from the past six months will teachers stick with once they’re back in school?
• One view on what practical classes might look like this year
• Expert teachers answer NQTs’ queries in our new column, Classroom questions

Teaching tips

• The latest in education research, including a scaffolding method to improve students’ scientific argumentation skills and tips on how to use concept maps and creative exercises to boost students’ conceptual understanding
• Useful strategies for linking education research with your own practice
• 5 tips to explain electrolysis to your students
• Banish chaos from your practical lessons and improve students’ learning with this step-by-step method

Worksheets and starter slides

• Starter slides on hexagonal salt and ionic/covalent structures, new solar cell and battery technology and a novel way of breaking bonds in alkanes
• Enhance your teaching of materials and explore how new types of concrete could reduce carbon emissions, with differentiated, synoptic worksheets to assess recall and identify revision topics (14–16)
• Making hand sanitiser: a topical angle for dicussing mixtures and formulations, with an activity to boost literacy and numeracy skills (11–14)
• Teaching analytical chemistry? Show students this article on the origins of the moon, accompanied by a simple experiment aiming to identify a chunk of meteorite based on its nickel content
• Analytical chemistry meets art: have students read how chemists are conserving paintings (with retrieval practice for 16–18) and introduce a careers’ angle with this article about a chemist working at the National Gallery
• Use this worksheet, ’Why should we believe in the rectivity series?’ to improve students’ ability to evaluate scientific evidence
• How to teach chemical energetics at 11–14 and encourage students to visualise the chemical changes and energy transfer in exo- and endothermic reactions
• Help students see graphs as more than just pictures with these tips, diagnostic exercise and cooling curves-based practical