It’s always amazing to me that there is just about anything you’d want to know (and even things you didn’t know you wanted to know) on the Internet. Just a few clicks in your favorite browser and you’re off on a flight of serendipitous discovery.
While on such a flight the other day, I came across a site that caught my attention: the Poetic Table of the Elements. I did a double take – yes, it’s “poetic” not “periodic.” This intrigued me.
The site has a traditional-looking periodic table, and for each element there are poems about it. Some are factual, others are whimsical, and a few could use some editing. But it’s really fun to see what people came up with.
I continued poking around and found the Periodic Table Printmaking Project, in which artists created blocks for each of the elements. The descriptions of each element include some of its physical properties, but the interesting part is how and why the artists chose their designs.
But then I started thinking. How many of our students have been assigned the traditional “element report”? In the BI times (Before Internet), the main goal of this activity was to get students to find information about a particular element. This was usually accomplished in the library, using text resources. But today, with a few clicks in a browser (or better yet, a search in SciLinks ) students can get pictures and lots of information about the characteristics and properties of any element. Many websites on the periodic table have summary pages for each element. So finding the information is not the exercise it used to be. Why would we ask students to copy facts about an element when the information is already and readily available?
Perhaps another approach might be to ask students to do something with the information – to look for patterns, to create multimedia materials for younger students, to rename an element based on its properties (my favorite was a student who renamed helium after herself – chelsium – because people jokingly called her an airhead), or to create a picture or write a poem.
By the way, I just had to know what the writers came up with to rhyme with Ytterbium!