Is anyone else working in this chapter? Doing the challenge?

[Katheryn "Katy" Shannon]

We are to the point of the assessment and due to shipment issues we never recieved the equipment kits for this chapter, which only affected a couple of activities.  We are now working on the assessment and my kidos are struggling.  I am teaching 9th grade physical science, therefore, they have only a cursory understanding of chemistry before they enter the course and we have only briefly introduced periodic table trends before we began the unit.  To help my students better understand the basics of an interactive museum exhibit, we took a voluntary Saturday field trip to our local science museum in Oklahoma City (Omniplex).  The field trip helped those who attended but I could not require it so I only had about 20% participate.  The groups with participants are off to a great start, but several groups are still floundering with such a broad challenge.

Any suggestions?  How did you help groups find structure?

Kate

[Eisenkraft]

Have you tried having them search the internet for ideas about how to display atomic structure or the nucleus.   This may be a good way to generate ideas.