Covalent Bonding and Bonding practice

Yesterday students learned about covalent bonding and used their knowledge of valence electrons to draw structures and connect unpaired electrons with other unpaired electrons to 'hold hands.' Students also practiced writing formulas and naming covalent compounds with prefixes. They practiced by making new BFF (Best friends forever) to get a 'bathroom pass' with. This is because in our simulations, anions, negative ions, represent girls, and a lot of the times it seems that girls need friends to go with them to the restroom. Everyone got a good giggle in and did some excellent covalent bonding with very few mistakes.

Today students learned a few more key terms like monatomic, diatomic, and polyatomic molecules. We discussed polar and non polar covalent bonds and how they share their electrons. POLAR BEARS DON'T SHARE is the way to remember that polar bonds are when electrons are shared unequally. Water is a polar molecule because oxygen doesn't share its electrons equally with the hydrogens. This is why water is sticks together in long drops when it drips.

Students practiced more covalent and ionic bonding and seemed to have very little trouble with it. We are looking at a test at the beginning of next week after a bit more practice.