Ionization Energy Worksheets Falling Flat? Try Data-Based Discovery!

Key Takeaways

[Music] how do you teach periodic trends are you teaching the trend as a package deal or are you focusing on each individual attribute each individual property of atoms in this video I'm going to share with you my lesson on ionization energy the periodic trend if you've been around here for a little while you might have seen my other periodic Trend video the one focused solely on atomic radius because yes I go separate I do it differently I don't teach them as a package deal because it's not really all about the periodic trend especially if you're working in the ngss standards or some State adaptation of that your goal your standard is to yes use the periodic table as a model but the focus is on predicting properties based on patterns of electrons it's not all about the pattern within the periodic table and so there's a just the standard itself is an argument for separating them here at labin every lesson what I try to inspire science teachers to do is go Discovery based go inquiry based each and every day training your students to dig in for themselves and uncover reveal the core ideas that you need them to learn of course your role is still super important but instead of just trying to passively transfer the knowledge it's all about you guiding and supporting and shepherding and that's how we can really take our classrooms from you being the end all Beall the when you are out for a day everything implodes to students really running the class room it's an entirely different culture shift so I'm so glad that you're here to join me before I show you this lesson today and the way I start all of my videos is really to give you some context to the bigger picture so in this lesson ions and ionization energy it's really important to highlight that I am nearing the end of my content unit my standard-based content unit on really all electrons that entire piece that is the pattern of electrons and outermost energy levels we start with the basic modeling of of atoms with bore and with shrodinger with box diagrams and electron configurations we use them to argue size and also patterns in the table for electron configurations leading to the octat rule and then the outcome of the octet will which can be predicting charges of course if electrons are are transferring at this point I haven't talked anything about electron sharing yet what we're really doing is setting up the students to argue for bonding one way or another in time now when I teach the ion and ionization energy lesson the periodic trend in ionization energy lesson I'm coming immediately off of predicting ion charges so what we're doing here is we're playing off of really still springboarding from the octet rule where I had to take some Liberties in that lesson that time I had to sort of just tell my students Nature's lazy it would rather do one thing than six things if it came down to losing an electron or gaining six so I really focused on the energy component of it but I didn't give them any actual like data no energy data this is the lesson where we get that energy data and we really get to say this is why our metals lose electrons and this is why our non-metals don't lose electrons because there is an energy barrier to doing that and it and it really becomes further evidence to support predictions that I've already taught them to make in the octet Ro it's also important to note that this is not the last in my series but almost the last in the series of lessons is the periodic law and now this lesson itself doesn't huge usually contribute to that periodic law lesson but in that periodic law lesson which is the next video I will post um it really hinges entirely on students reviewing what they know about everything we can get from the periodic table to expose the similarities between elements and groups and that's how we do learning here at lab and every lesson it's really about our job BEC so hyper hyper specific to our content knowledge and our content m and using that to craft um experiences not just lessons but experiences for our students what we're also looking at here in this worksheet is the breakdown of Science and Engineering practices which are laid out by the ngss and in Pennsylvania I work with the steel standards and the cross cutting concepts of science that are laid out there now if you are a secondary science teacher and you're just watching to see what you can glean from this lesson and or you you don't use the ngss standards you're not you're not bound to following them still trying to do so will bring life to your lessons focusing on incorporating these pieces will make walking away from lecture or just letting go the safety net of lecture so much easier because the premise of active learning and inquiry based learning is that the students are doing but you are their guide and so this is your playbook this is your playbook in this lesson in particular ionization energy periodic trends and ionization energy my students are developing and using models not of atoms though pretty much throughout this entire other unit we're focusing on the model of the atom and we will use that in this lesson to argue the reason why so arguing from evidence is pretty much a standard goto across all of my lessons is a goal that I have for my students but rather using the periodic table as a model so anytime we have a periodic trend lesson Focus it's periodic table as a model right so that's where we're using the model here but really honing in on quantitative data in this lesson so analyzing interpreting data that students obtain themselves that students evaluate themselves and that students communicate back to everyone themselves these are key science practices and when they do those things we are going for a lot of cross-cutting Concepts here when we are working in this lesson the things that we can highlight as teachers um and certainly in the design of this lesson making sure those those themes are coming through that the pattern exists inside the periodic table that in terms of cause and effect ionization energy is what's required for those electrons to jump out there is some action that's happening and the cause is the energy we zap the atom with right so I mean that's like an underlying it's not necessarily the Forefront here but it's playing in the background students need to realize this is not just something you know this is an event that could potentially happen and will it happen based on scale proportion and quantity scale proportion and quantity relating to what well firstly the number of electrons in the orbitals and why or how many will jump out because ionization energy is all about electrons taken hike right but also in the quantity or the scale of the energy that's applied one relative to another and that's where our system and system models come in because we are going to refer back to those bore models to those distances from the nucleus to the number of protons inside the nucleus to rationalize and explain why some electrons hold on for dear life and others the nucleus is like I oh I didn't even notice you were gone you know energy and matter obviously when we're talking about energy the lesson itself the core idea itself has energy in the title we're dealing with energy right and matter is a and as an idea that's happening and civility change that lesser energy required for this process to happen for an electron to get pulled off of an atom would mean it's more favorable so really touching on that as well the only cross- cutting concept really not addressed here is structure and function and I personally don't highlight or encourage or emphasize that here because I haven't yet launched into bonding now if you're teaching this lesson in the context of ionic bonding then absolutely then you're going to emphasize and you're going to tweak things a little bit to make sure that students are aware that when that electron comes off it's going to another atom and there is a cause and effect with that relationship as well so I believe that some of our cross cutting Concepts either shine through or don't based on the bigger context we're giving them and you can definitely tweak that in your learning intentions for the lesson before I quickly jump into that tidbit of knowledge I want to let you know you can download this worksheet which outlines my approach to satisfying this this structure and properties of matter standard strand in the njss the link is in the description below as to learning intentions and tweaking those those are one of five components in a framework I have for lesson planning and if you've watched a video on my channel before you've heard of it before I've said it a whole lot of times now but for anybody who knew that who may be new that's watching I'm going to go through them even again first review and preview it's a warm-up it's a bell ringer what it does is it causes students to activate what they already know maybe not academic even maybe life experience-based and integrate it to what's coming down the pike in the lesson for the day so it's not just some random activation it's not like a word search or a word find it's not to jog your memory with vocabulary it's like you're in it it extends your lesson is going to extend that warmup so that honestly sometimes by the time I'm done with review and preview my students have half the lesson they've got half the core idea doesn't work that way always but a lot of the times it does learning objective expressed as learning intentions and success criteria they help us separate the why and the what from the how so our learning intentions going to be real specific about why bother because students always want to know that right why bother learn this well in chemistry and in any very cumulative subject the content links together and it builds and so usually there's a bigger reason really for every single lesson in this series I've just been talking about it's the same learning intention and that is to get us to the rationale the explanation for bonding and for chemical change and the prediction to be able to make to be able to make predictions in that context success criteria though those are things that students can actually use to check off throughout class as they're completing activities monitor their own engagement be done with a day and uh look back on what they did or be done with a whole unit or a whole month and look back at this list of all that they've accomplished in fact My Success criteria allow me to copy and paste at the end of a unit all the things the students should be able to do and proof to them they have done come test time but then there's also assessment specific success criteria we in a class like mine like chemistry students have to be able to complete a standardized style exam in addition to the deep thinking stuff and when I first devised this framework it was really important to me because I wasn't totally sure that the activity I had designed would connect in that way that students would be able to see it through and sort it out um and if nothing else it allows me a bullet point there for me to go this is what they need to be able to do make sure it happens but most importantly when you give students success criteria and they have it as a means of tracking their own learning you are one step closer to students centered and really giving those those learning skills that will last a lifetime that will teach them through modeling how we how we track our progress how we set our goals how we fulfill our goals then we have always an activity I am the active learning inquiry based secondary science student centered secondary science teacher so we need an activity a lot of my activities are simulation driven but when I can't find a simulation I go with an interactive tutorial or a video or a text there's always something students are doing and they're not doing it because I showed them how they're not doing it because um they need practice they're doing it to unearth the main idea because there no lecture happening here as part of that activity there is a data dependent analysis there is a look at either qualitative observations or quantitative numbers that allow students to find patterns and to use math concepts to I mean do anything in that science and engineering practice realm um analyze and interpret data construct explanations design Solutions ask more questions or further Define a problem it's where the magic happens really and typically I'm leading students through that as a together activity and then at the end we do the skill practice that makes sure it's all tied to that assessment specific success criteria and making sure our students are going to achieve they're not just engaged it matters and they're going to learn the thing they need the review and preview for this lesson ionization energy ties directly to the lesson I have taught before it the day before so asking students here to use the periodic table to determine the charge on an element when it ionizes um they've got six examples here three of them are metals three of them are non-metals making sure we share the love with the cations and anion alike if you haven't watch that video please do take a take a peek at that because that lesson provided multiple ways for students to get to this information we heavily used models to make the math more palatable but then gave two options for determining charge using simple math addition and subtraction and also that periodic table hack which is really what I'm wanting students to do here because one of our learning intentions throughout is to always be able to go to the periodic table do it quickly and easily even though we have a toolbox full of models we could pull out and draw if we need to so you can see here totally equipping them maybe they were absent the day before maybe this is where you're going to capture that student who missed class yesterday maybe they were involved in some CL club or group or they were dismissed early and they missed your class whatever the case might be and they're not quite sure yet they've not caught up on what you did but they get a great snapshot here and they can maybe work with a partner to help them sort through you know your high achieving students will get it just from this simple 5 10 15 minute activity um but for your struggling Learners or your average student honestly they just need more practice with this and you haven't waited to the end of the week to give a homework or you didn't give this as homework because you know there's a whole lot going on with your students and maybe term papers they have to write and different things they have to do so you're giving this practice in the now when you're there to support them when they can get explanation after explanation you go over it um and you have the ability to do that here also this is designed so that students can use what they know to determine what they don't know so they truly don't even even have to lean completely on the periodic table hacks here or their other toolbox um toolbox tools what they can do is use the number of protons and electrons to get the ion charge or work backwards right so we have some missing information here and some information that can be a key to determining if a student doesn't know how to get the total number of electrons after the octat rule has been applied then they could take the queue from some other elements in the list but this does kind of cue up for us patterns all over again periodic patterns because when we review this we should be able to say hey there group one elements you're all charged plus one and so on and so forth it reinforces that idea that our charges on ions aren't going to be any greater than three plus or minus and that metals are always positive non-metals are always negative learning intention success criteria as promised here today I'm learning about ionization energy that's worth a quick pause to just uh reiterate that's that learning attention is the what and the why so sometimes you'll see my learning intentions written today I'm learning how to because it's a very skill-based lesson today my students already learned about how to apply the octet rule today they're learning about the energy that's required so just a shout out there your words matter always talk like a scientist that goes to our disciplinary literacy skills the reading and writing of some of these higher level Sciences um because they need to understand you we need to understand them right using the pattern observed throughout the periodic table to predict the likelihood of chemical change and explain how and why atoms will undergo change through bonding again that's the through line for the entire unit because that's very standard driven that's the what we're learning and the why now the how students now this lesson actually looks so similar to my atomic radius lesson because we use the same simulation to gather our data so I always right I'll be able to Define terms on the word wall here specifically we're looking at the terms ion ionization energy and I throw out a little bit about electron affinity even though me and my class we don't focus on electron affinity as of as a trend they need to be familiar with I honestly don't know why that is if you know why that is feel free to drop in the comments below but I've taught at the college level I've taught at the high school level I've never seen electron affinity be like a thing that we have students sort out um maybe because because as an extension activity we can get to one from the other maybe we want students to list the ionization energy value so they're going to go to a place they're going to collect values they're going to obtain their data for elements in Period 2 group one and then they're going to evaluate that data by annotating the actual periodic table this is exactly what we did in the atomic radius lesson so they build the trend for themselves then the sorting out the CER style arguing evidence what's the claim what's the evidence what's the reasoning really leaning on that atomic size Trend that we've already learned about and what we've learned about the octal frankly and the structure of atoms in general to compare the amount of energy required for atoms to lose electrons then go forward with this trend and use it to compare ionization energies this is that word while I referred to very very simply I might give this a quick two three minute nod share with students what is ionization energy cuz you know as terms and definitions and Technical jargon goes this is probably one of the most misunderstood by virtue of the fact that ionization as a process is the process of an ion becoming an atom becoming an ion a neutral becoming a charged atom then we call it ionization energy and that makes it seem like it's the energy to create any ion cation or annion this one is of course very specific to the formation of a cation how much energy it takes to just pull electrons which is why I always share with students there is a similar feature a similar quantity of energy we can observe which is called electron affinity the energy for an atom to accept electrons because that could be prohibitive too but after laying that Foundation I send them back to the same interactive periodic table they used for the atomic radius lesson and again here Tas instructions super generic this is what I would project on the board as students are working because the artifact outline I give them on which to collect their data their observations graphic organizer if you will you can call it a worksheet if you want to it is usually very specific and very strategically designed to facilitate analysis to make the patterns pop that's what we're after today so they're going to visit a website compare ionization energies record observations and mark up the periodic table this is what that artifact outline looks like I know it's a lot of words here at first really important to just take it step by step excellent deliver digitally because it's a link so you know saving this slide as a PNG file loading it as a background to a Google slide or I really really love and Advocate the use seesaw in your classes because if you use it consistently it will give students a home for all of their science work for the entire year and you have to do virtually nothing for that to happen so it's win-win plus their families can see their progress if you want them to if you want to know more about seesaw I also have a link down below to my edac essentials guide uh and you can download that too it's super comprehensive it help you get started right away with an activity like this loading it in creating an account doing the whole thing but I digress uh here again there are places for students to record the number the energy number in kog per mole for lithium versus the four elements below it in group one and lithium versus the four elements to the right of it in Period two then asking students to highlight blue or Draw blue boxes around elements that have greater ionization energy than lithium green for smaller ionization energy than lithium so what we're doing here folks be clear we're obtaining information collecting it we're observing it's a science practice we are using the periodic table as a model as we evaluate that evidence we're looking at the numbers we're thinking about the numbers you might argue a little bit of math and computational thinking here definitely scale proportion quantity and creating evidence we're actually creating evidence by having them annotate the table it becomes very clear then where are the biggest energies where are the smallest energies now it's almost an extension question because your highest achieving students will have the time to consider it but maybe in the 15 minutes or so you allow for this activity to take place your your slower students or the ones who aren't aren't as uh fluent in data analysis or just move slower do do all the executive things slower they might not get to the big question at the end but really what we want to connect to is why how is this evidence what does this mean why is this happening um and giving that prompt this is the guided part of guided inquiry and chemistry is tough you know so inquiry based chemistry I had promote guidance consider what you already know about size so also what we're doing here is we're spiraling so we're activating even more prior knowledge and pulling it in what students can do at this point is either actually on their paper actually on their screen or in their Mind's Eye see the atomic radius periodic trend and apply that realizing that they're opposites and that the greater ionization energies are coming from elements that are smaller and I'm giving them those choices now this is a big part of where you can differentiate your students you get rid of that all together so as to quell the concerns about oh my gosh there's so much to do or take down the critical thinking uh there's two ways I differentiate I take down the critical thinking or I raise it I take down the amount students have to do or I increase it another way to differentiate this lesson would be to do students Partners so so that the data collection even goes faster you can do the activity in a smaller amount of time because one student will collect the data from group one one student will collect the data from period two and then they will put their heads together and answer that question everybody gets to the question and doing it together lowers the critical thinking threshold too right because you're kind of brainstorming and you're chatting about it this is the essence of the whole lesson this is the slide where I would prompt students uh to say actually I'd probably share my answer key of course I'm watching what students are doing there's a lot of times wherever I can I capitalize on student work to project it and talk through it but for this activity there is no way anybody is answering anything different than what's seen here and having it be correct so it might say okay everybody found these are our smaller elements um our smaller ionization energies these are the greater ones now not asking why because that's the one thing you don't want to do ever ever why shuts down everything everything instead ask where's the evidence what's the evidence and so what I'm pointing to here is to cite evidence to explain why so what do you see the reason that helps engagement is because everyone can see not everyone knows and even if they do know they think they don't know or they're shy or they're self-conscious or there's all this stuff happening right but everyone can see and everybody can say what they see so I've added some models on the board here here we are using models to argue evidence from data we collected so many of those science practices here systems and system models at work cross cutting concept I can't flip my screen when I'm recording in this mode sometimes I need to look at the list again um okay site evidence to explain why veence electrons in big atoms Escape more easily than in little atoms so here I would simply say what do you see in cesium versus lithium that allows that cesium electron to to take a hike pretty easily because that's low energy I'm drawing all my my energies here in terms of higher ionization energy so the lowest ionization energy down near francium the highest up near Florine and clarifying that too right all these notes on the board um ultimately students will almost always cite the number of electrons but and this is a value in doing it after we've talked about atomic radius at some point now this for me this is several days maybe maybe more than a week maybe two weeks from I atomic radius um but they've already recognize that they can no longer ignore the nucleus because the nucleus was important to size and why some atoms in the same period were smaller than others uh but here the nucleus is obviously quite different the number of orbitals also was integral to the size the reasoning why size obeyed this pattern within the periodic table so it doesn't take too long for students to connect that orbitals are the culprit for low ionization energies and protons are the culprit for high ionization energies because really it's the same reasoning as atomic radius it's just an opposite Trend and that's something that we highlight so um because this is has been traditionally a more challenging core idea for me to get from students in the past I do include if there's any place I do lecture it's usually after we have had this discussion about our activity data and so this is you know as an extent of lecture and maybe if students need to grab some notes these are the ones that are important highlighting here first of all that we're only looking at the main group elements this doesn't apply to our transition or inner transition metal elements focusing on the orbitals important in groups and what I like to call the proton power and and this is going to depend on you and your um your level of student that you work with certainly if you work with honors you're probably going to talk about effective nuclear charge you're probably going to talk about um electron shielding I don't I simply say proton power the of protons in the nucleus has the ability to create greater electrostatic attraction period and sometimes I'll throw in that it's like Spanx higher proton power is like putting on a pair of Spanx sucks you in and it Smooths you out because sometimes they get a little silly I also usually throw in because my students know about the octet r at this point and they've already argued the fact that nitrogen oxygen Florine they already have almost what they need for an octet so it's like when you're saving money for something really special and you're saving you're saving you're almost there and something up else comes up that you want to buy but my heart really set on this not going to let any of my money go I'm going to just keep waiting and these these elements that are already close to their OCT absolutely won't let them go so I throw that into again it's sort of an optional thing there's not a whole lot of like data data building in that but it what it does is it does spiral in this idea that the octet rule leads us to the reason for bonding the reason for reaction and ionization energy is chemical change so as another reason why I like to remind students at the end we can summarize it and almost all of the lessons in this whole unit that I present can come down to periodic table a model periodic table patterns the biggest one being metal versus non-metal and we could break this down just like we break it down on how they ionize lose versus gain and plus versus minus we're saying here ionization energy always high for non-metals always low for metals and of course this is a great opportunity to tie in all those other things we know about metals and non-metals because ionization energy and this is where I remind students what it means we might even go back to the word while and say remember this is about plucking an electron away which atoms like to do that you know and we can say yeah our metals they like to lose electrons they become positive and so on so it's a good overarching the idea here is even if you are leading the most heavily during this period of time you're delivering this lesson they are still doing ample work cuz your leading is coming through as questions unless you have a really bright group and they could just tell you the whole thing right they could tell you the whole story I have not had the advantage of working with really high achieving students with these lessons and so I would venture that they need some differentiation applied to remove some of the guidance that's all you'd have to do remove some of the guidance and then they truly they have the muse and they have the skeleton for digging up that core idea all themselves at the end like in every one of my lessons I've got some skill practice ultimately kids are going to hit a question on a test or homework which of the one which of these four has the greatest ionization energy and do it and do it and do it again there's two examples here oh when I sell lessons on Teachers Pay Teachers in my store I'm always including an exit ticket most likely and those exit Tia questions are in a program called book widgets book to give it all you need is a link however you can't collect data on the back end of that program unless you have a subscription uh but you can have students download the work or screenshot their answers and submit it to you some other way so I always like to include it even if you don't want to be a subscriber to book widgets but book witchet is amazing I love it every one of my lessons also has a book book widget um counterpart a book widget sister or brother which is the entire lesson from goals and warm-ups straight through SK skill practice and it's program to show students the right answers as they click as they write um so that they get that instant feedback if for example they have to leave school early for a sporting event and they miss your class but they want to stay current it becomes their homework and they could just follow up and iron out the details with you the next day uh or if you need to be out and you have a sub this becomes your substitute plan the beauty of working this consistently every day this kind of program is that your students are just well versed in learning this way and a classroom routine emerges from the framework that is in these lessons so students know what they're going to get from phase to phase and how to walk through it themselves lends itself very well to this student centered culture even if you love flipping your classroom giving them what they need to know and then having them do the thing flipping your classroom in this way amazing and then your next day is spent all with the conversation of data analysis because frankly every student can do the observation activity again they all have the peepers they all have the eyes to get it done