Atoms, molecules, protons, electrons, bonding. Nothing new there, so why don’t your students remember which is which and how it works? A question with many possible answers, but now, perhaps a solution! Use this learning package to introduce, review, or add to your instruction. How Atoms Bond: Ionic Bonds uses animated sequences to really hit home how electrons are involved in bonding. MUCH easier than drawing them yourself!

This is just one of over 30 lesson packages that are part of the Chemistry Now series produced by the team of NSTA, NBC Learn, and NSF. If you use them, please leave comments below each posting about how well the information worked in real-world classrooms. And if you had to make significant changes to a lesson, we’d love to see what you did differently, as well as why you made the changes. Leave a comment, and we’ll get in touch with you with submission information.

–Judy Elgin Jensen

Photo of salt pools and harvest in southern India by Perumal Venkatesan 

Video: “How Atoms Bond: Ionic Bonds” uses common table salt to explain and illustrate what happens between the electrons and protons in atoms of the element sodium and atoms and the element chlorine to make crystals of sodium chloride.

Video: “Chemistry of Salt (NaCl)” explains and illustrates the molecular structure of sodium chloride (NaCl) crystals; the structure and symmetry of crystal lattices; and why one crystalline solid, salt, melts another, ice.

Video: “The Chemical Bonding Between Cloves and Nutmeg” focuses on the variety, strengths — and placement — of chemical bonds in the structures of molecules. In a “bonding” story of another kind, NBC Learn profiles Purdue materials chemist Jon Wilker, who’s making synthetic adhesives based on the glues mussels produce underwater.

Video: The NBC News report “First-Ever Image of a Molecule,” shows the picture of a molecule of pentacene taken by researchers at IBM.

High school lesson: In this lesson, students compare ionic and covalent bonds by examining water’s Lewis dot structure and observing water’s reaction to a statically charged material.

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