Organic labs can be tough at the high school level. But an organic reaction lab usually requires a lot of chemicals and lab equipment most of us don’t have. Those covalent bonds take a lot of time and energy to break and reform. Time that most of us simply don’t have.
We all know my humble beginnings as a chemistry teacher. I taught out of an old art classroom with one sink, three outlets (1 for students, 1 for my PC, and 1 in a closet) and an obscene amount of Epsom salt… I was also teaching in New York, where students must complete 20 hours of lab activities in order to qualify for the State Final Exam. (And before Covid, the labs HAD to be real life labs – digital didn’t count).
I was on a year-long mission to get a collection of simple, but high quality labs that would qualify and meet the standards of the state.
Fun Organic Chemistry Lab
I like to teach Organic at the end of the year. It doesn’t really fit with much of the other units. I know of people who teach it with bonding. In my opinion, that’s A LOT of nomenclature at one time. Plus, you can’t really get the full effect of Organic without teaching Intermolecular Forces and Chemical Reactions. At the end of the year, many of my students are gassed out. I always assigned more than the 20 hours of labs required, but we know high school students. Getting those turned in was also a challenge. I needed labs for the end of the year that actually got them to do the work!
For this purpose I decided on a polymerization of liquid glue using aqueous borax! It’s a simple enough lab. It’s obviously fun. It’s a day that I come to school in jeans. We use food coloring and glitter (because it’s me).
Materials for Organic Lab
I used to use bowls, but now we do the entire lab in the ziplock storage bags! You’ll need liquid glue. I’ve found that classic white school glue works best. You’ll need a saturated borax solution. (I like this for the vocab review too!) You’ll also need water. After that the food coloring and glitter is optional.
Making Slime
In the ziplock bag, add equal parts water and school glue. Manipulate the bag in order to mix the two together. Mix until the clumps of glue have been broken down. At this point, food coloring and glitter should be added. Have students work together or keep their ziplock propped up in a beaker to reduce spills. Then about a teaspoon at a time, add the saturated borax solution. This is the catalyst that gets the glue to polymerize. Just like earlier, manipulate the outside of the bag to get the solutions to mix. The glue will begin to polymerize. Add in borax solution until most of the glue has polymerized.
At this point, students may remove the slime from the bag and continue to massage and stretch to get all those glue particles tangled up together. It needs no further polymerization when the slime does not stick to hands, and is stretchy. It is easy to over-polymerize. In this case, adding water can help, but rarely does the slime entirely recover. It will be crumbly and very messy.
Lab Reporting
This organic reaction lab is available in my TPT store. It includes the student handout where they write up the observations and conclusion paragraph. There’s also a teacher set up guide and rubric for students to use with students on the lab report. I’ll be honest, there is nearly no math or data collection here (at least numerical data). The students are collecting entirely observational data. Which in my book is just fine! Organic Chemistry is super boring, we can certainly work to make it fun!
End of the School Year?
If you’re like me, and doing this lab at the end of your school year, check out my free Back to School Prep Checklist. It’ll help you now to prepare yourself for next year! Your BTS self will thank you.
