Week 10 - October 4, 2018 History of the Atomic Theory and the Atomic Model

This week we started Unit 3 Atomic Theory by covering the history of how our current understanding of the atom developed. At the end of last week's blog, a Crash Course video quickly covers how the understanding of the composition of atoms went from the "atomos" idea all the way to our current electron cloud model. The History of Atomic Theory  video is shown below for those who didn't get a chance to watch it.

We cut out an accordion foldable and students were given directions on how to make a timeline to be added to their interactive notebooks. The information they need to make the timeline is linked below along with the graphic organizer/classroom activity we worked on in class, but students are to finish at home.
Atomic Theory Timeline and Bohr Model Worksheet

Students were given some notes to take during class because those notes would help them to construct Bohr models. The full set of notes are shown below:

We used poster board and Skittles to practice constructing various elements after determining the number of electrons, protons, and neutrons in a given element. Too bad I forgot to take pictures! Anyhoo, this exercise seemed to really help the kids to solidify their understanding of how atomic number relates to proton and electron number in a neutral atom as well how mass number relates to calculating neutron number.

Since I want to teach this in chunks, I want to leave students free to complete the worksheet we did in class and become comfortable with calculating protons, neutrons, and electrons in a neutral atom. Next week, we will continue this lesson and learn how to calculate the number of protons, electrons, and neutrons for an ion and discuss isotopes. From there we will move on to taking a closer look at the periodic table.