Using AACT Resources to Help Teach Acids and Bases

As chemistry teachers plan activities for their students, AACT will highlight resources from our high school library that help to reinforce topics in different units throughout the school year. In our last news post, we looked at classroom resources that focused on equilibrium. We will now focus on lessons and activities that can be used in an Acids and Bases unit.

Since our original post in May 2018, we have added a few more resources that you might consider trying with your students. Additionally, we have created a unit plan that uses many of our resources to help you teach a unit on acids and bases.

Introduce the unit with the Acid & Base Guys video which tells the story of how the definition of acids and bases evolved from Lavoisier’s hypothesis that acidity is caused by oxygen atoms, to Arrhenius’s definition of an acid as a producer of positive hydrogen ions, then changed to acids as proton donors by Bronsted and Lowry, finally switching to acids as electron acceptors by Lewis.

• Have your students use the Acid & Base Guys Video Questions activity to answer questions while watching the video. You can now have your students access the videos in our Multimedia Library up to ten times a year with our Student Video Pass. Read more about this member benefit on our FAQ page.

Use the Hydrolysis of Salts lab to introduce the topic of the acid-base properties of salts. During this lab, students observe the hydrolysis of several salt samples, predict which solutions are acidic, basic or neutral, and then discover the pH of each through the use of indicators. They then share and compile their experimental results, as well as have an opportunity to determine the net-ionic equations for each reaction.

We hope that these activities can help you to reinforce several of the topics covered in a unit about acids and bases. Most of these lessons were made possible by great teachers who shared their own resources. We need your help to keep the collection growing. Do you have a great demonstration, activity, or lesson related to this topic that you would like to share with the community? Please send it along for consideration.