Middle School Chemistry

 Are you a middle school science teacher looking for a free, inquiry-based lesson plans? Middle School Chemistry from the American Chemical Society is a completely free chemistry course for students in grade 6 through 8. It covers basic chemistry concepts explained with the process of scientific investigation. The entire course can be downloaded as a single PDF file of 691 pages or you can go one lesson at a time. There are six chapters with each chapter containing 5-6 lessons.

Each lesson begins with the important information a teacher is required to have, key concepts which will be taught, and students’ activities and how they are related to the key concepts. This is followed by the lesson objectives, materials required for the student experiments and teacher demonstrations and safety requirements.

Each lesson is written with “5-E” teaching strategy that involves five steps: Engage, Explore, Explain, Extend, and Evaluate. At the end of each lesson, there are 6 to 10 pages of printable text which summarizes what has been learned during the inquiry and discovery lesson. 

I recommend this website not only to all the middle school science teachers but also to parents who wants to involve in their child’s learning process. It should be noted that, although the preparation is minimal with easily available materials, it requires active participation of teacher /parents with discussion a big part of the game.