In high school, I did not do very well in chemistry. Not having a good foundation in grade school didn’t help. During my sophomore year chemistry-physics class, I felt lost the majority of the time. It was frustrating at best, humiliating at worst, when I didn’t understand what was going on (and it appeared everyone else did). It felt like intellectual drowning, and I could barely keep my head above water. In college, I did not pursue any advanced chemistry because I felt so bad during that high school year.

In my first year as an assistant at Rogers Park Montessori, my head teacher, Lupy Cepeda, allowed me to create interesting follow-ups for book groups and other reading comprehension lessons. I made lots of follow-ups based on what I wish I could have done in the classroom when I was younger. Later in the year, she said we had to do a chemistry component, and I felt an instant pang of anxiety stemming from high school. I knew I was going to have to reteach myself basic chemistry so the students would have a better foundation than what I had. After lots of reading, I started coming up with a series of lessons that would become “The Atom Workshop.”

It took several iterations before I really began to feel comfortable with the basic principles of chemistry using the periodic table. I had to relearn everything, then know it well enough to teach it. As I was teaching myself chemistry, I realized there could be a nice scaffolding approach that could be taken so that previous knowledge could logically build upon itself. This is the approach I took with the Atom Workshop, which is a series of lessons that will provide individualized grade level lessons for your upper elementary, and then bring all the students together to showcase their knowledge through building molecules.

Fourth graders focus on using the periodic table for deriving the subatomic particles of an atom. Fifth graders dive deeper into using the periodic table to understand electron energy levels and valence electron placement. Sixth graders look at the different type of electron bonds, and how they build molecules. The Atom Workshop lesson series works as a repeatable three-year lesson cycle that builds upon the knowledge of last year. I have had lots of students tell me this was one of their favorite lessons, which was an honor to hear, especially coming from a guy who barely passed high school chemistry.

If you are interested in this series of lessons, click on the link Atom Workshop, where it is currently available on TpT. At some point, I will bundle all my classroom simulations together and offer them directly on the website, but for now, you can get the lesson a la carte now.