High School Lab Science – Chemistry

 Our curricula comes from American Modeling Teacher’s Association. An aspect of Modeling Instruction that is different from traditional science education is that students are unable to get the right answer without understanding the underlying science.  Students are shown a series of demonstrations or participate in labs that help THEM develop the scientific theories and information on their own.  Labs and demos are carefully chosen to hasten the process by highlighting critical differences.  Please see this page for more information–including a short video that helps explain how Modeling is different from traditional teaching.  Our lead teacher, Heather DeGeorge, has completed multiple teacher training courses at the graduate level for using this methodology.

There is no defined textbook for this course, but there may be required reading handed out and we sometimes watch videos to solidify some of the concepts.  Students will absolutely have homework each week that might include watching a video. Parents and students will be participating in an online portal to keep on top of assignments and progress.

 

Students will need:

• 1″ to 1-1/2″ binder with 100 sheets of filler/looseleaf paper (graph paper will be provided)
• colored pencil set (at minimum, red, yellow, blue & green)
• covered pencil sharpener (blade not exposed)
• 12″ ruler
• pencil bag to contain items

Additionally, students will need technical ability to access Zoom, Nearpod.com, Discovery Education Streaming, Study.com and Canvas (our learning management system).

At home, students will need access to the internet (home or library) to look up information, related published materials and/or videos and do work through our class learning management system. Some videos will be subscription-based and issued by illuminat-ED (all students will have accounts for Discovery Streaming and Study.com for additional video support). Some videos will be freely available.

Amount of time will depend on your student’s speed/fluency with writing, reading or the topic at hand and the content of the week. Families should allocate approximately 2-3 hours/week to complete various assigned labs, tasks or group collaboration that might require internet access in preparation for live class. Some of this can be done during Flex Work Time at our facility.

Combined with our live class time, this is a total of 3-1/2 to 5-1/2 hours/week for a course total of approximately 130+ hours.  This equates to one full credit using the Carnegie unit methodology.

Rather than simply confirming what students have learned from their teacher, problem sheets and experiments provide the opportunities for students to develop models to help them make sense of their observations.   Topics covered include:

• Conservation of mass; mass and volume
• Gas pressure
• Kinetic Molecular Theory
• Conservation of energy
• Energy storage and transfer
• Avogadro’s Hypothesis and molar mass
• Molecular vs. ionic compounds
• Nomenclature
• Chemical and thermal energy
• Balanced equations

This course may or may not include more topics depending on where the students journey takes them.  The topics listed above are the topics that we know will be covered.

This is a teen-oriented course that will have lab experiments every week. It is NOT math-intensive and in fact, most of our graphs do not have numbers. Students will be doing math at a very basic algebra level but they learn a significant number of concepts that are helpful in both physics and biology as well as traditional math.

Students will also regularly be on point to share ideas in front of a group and participate in group activities during our online sessions.  Shy students will not be bullied into participating by any means; but if your student does not have a habit of “warming up” after getting to know a group–this may not be a comfortable setting for them.