Can teachers make Chemistry less stressful for students?

I am not sure about this one. After all, chemistry gets the bad rep for being hard and a lot of work. But while this may be true, teachers can help make the beginning of the school year less stressful for their students by easing into chemistry using a low pressure, high bang for their buck activity.

In this one- to two- day Back to School activity, designed for a high school Chemistry classroom, students visually share and learn various facts about each other which helps in building a supportive classroom community and, along the way, learn some chemistry lingo and facts that will come in handy later. But, psssst! Don't tell them they are unconsciously learning chemistry. Just let them have fun getting to know each other and their teacher.

Why and how does this learning strategy work?

The main idea is to begin the new school year and your chemistry class low-stress. This benefits both students and teachers as we often find getting back to doing something we are rusty on rough (translation for non-teachers: we are barely holding it together and are ten seconds from crashing out, because we are only about 50% sure we still know how to participate in society at large, let alone teach). So rather than continuously wondering about the 10,000 things that can go wrong (but never will) in the first few days of the new school year, we can combine chemistry, social-emotional learning, and classroom community-building and get to know our students a little bit before we hit them with atoms, bonding, stoichiometry, and Le Chatelier's Principle.

Student Learning and Performance Objectives:

1. Put together a periodic table of chemistry students in our class.

2. Create an element box for each student with their characteristics, likes, dislikes etc.

3. Start building a classroom community.

4. Allow students to familiarize themselves with each other by learning a few things about their classmates.

What's included:

1. 10 slides that introduce, explain, and guide the teacher and students through this 2-day activity

2. An element box/card template for either digital or old school use (you choose)

3. Teacher notes explaining the purpose, teacher participation, possible extensions, and the side benefits of the activity

4. Student Learning and Performance Objectives

5. Materials list

6. Detailed directions for what information students should include on their card

7. Directions on how to assemble the classroom periodic table

8. Follow up discussion questions