Vocabulary lessons are some of my least favorite to teach so I have found some creative ways to spruce them up. I find that students also don’t have a preference for these lessons very much. When teaching separation of mixtures, it can be a lot of information overload! To ease that feeling, I have created an activity where students move around the room and get to practice using the new terms they’ve learned. Let me tell you about my separation of mixtures lesson!
Separation of Mixtures Guided Notes Lesson
I start my lesson by teaching six ways to separate mixtures. They are distillation, chromatography, precipitation reaction, use of a separatory funnel, evaporation and filtration. I love using guided notes for this because the kids really get to take a look at the pictures that are included in the notes instead of spending a bunch of time writing. I believe the more time they spend listening and the less time writing the better they will understand the content. My guided notes have scientifically accurate pictures. That means that students don’t have to rely on their art skills in order to have proper notes. I don’t know about you but I can’t draw a distillation setup to save my life!
Now you may be thinking that a precipitation reaction is not a classic way to separate mixtures. I disagree. Precipitation reactions are used to determine if certain ions are dissolved in water. Let’s take lead for example. Precipitating lead with the use of a halide ion is pretty commonplace in chemistry. For that reason I appreciate having the precipitation reaction in my high school level separation of mixtures lesson.
Self Assessment Questions
Once the students have all of their notes taken and have a basic understanding of the ways to separate mixtures they will complete some self-assessment questions in their notebooks. I call them “show what you know questions“. This allows the students to really make sure they have a good understanding before moving into our practice activity. These questions more or less ask them how to separate hypothetical mixtures.
Classroom Activity
When that piece is finished the students will move around my classroom to do the separation of mixtures activity. It’s sort of like a maze. The students have to start with a particular piece of paper which is folded in half and posted on my classroom wall. The students read the prompt and then open up the paper to find a question about separating mixtures. Then they must look at the other folded pieces of paper all over the classroom to find the answer. I call it a “Chemistry Quest.”
For example let’s say the first question is “what type of mixture has visually distinguishable layers?” They would search the room to find the answer, “heterogeneous mixture.” Once they find that card, they unfold the paper to find their next question. As they move through the classroom answering these questions, they write them down on an answer catcher. The only way to complete this worksheet is to have every single square filled out in the correct order. If they finish with empty spaces they have skipped over something and need to go back and find the error.
Solo or Group Work?
I love having pairs or trios of students work on this together. I’m a huge fan of group work and I believe two heads are better than one. Especially with a very vocabulary heavy lesson where students can use their notes, I like that they have the ability to talk out their thoughts with another student.
After listening to me speak/lecture for so much of the class, this really helps them to get their thoughts moving around and helps to loosen them up from sitting in their desks on high alert through the class.
Modifications
I’ve done this activity for a few years, but I’ve had to modify it a bit. For one of my students his IEP was very specific and this activity simply wouldn’t work for him. I created a worksheet that has all of the same questions and responses that does not require students to move around the classroom. Effectively it looks like a matching worksheet. It was great for this student in particular, but it was also very handy for absent students who didn’t have the opportunity to walk around the classroom.
Additionally I had a student who spoke exclusively Spanish. This was one of the years I did not have a co-teacher and I was left to fend for myself on how to best teach the student. For a very vocabulary have a lesson I find that it’s best to translate into the native language. This resource is also available in Spanish.
You can find this lesson and the activity on Teachers Pay Teachers. Here is what some other teachers had to say about this activity:
