Chemistry

What's the difference between Waldorf chemistry resources and Unit Study resources? Primarily, it's in the scientific content. You'll find all the science that's been discovered through years and years of science exploration in chemistry and beyond collected and organized in the following resources. What you won't find is the opportunity for your student to make his or her own conclusions based on observations of the phenomenon through chemistry demonstrations. Explore resources for both a chemistry unit study as well as a Waldorf inspired Chemistry main lesson block

For this Chemistry Block, we worked through the Live Education Waldorf curriculum for many of our demonstrations and lessons while including the book Chemistry the Waldorf Way for addition demonstrations. We documented each demonstration and lesson including the written narrations or lab reports.

For this chemistry block, I had to think of projects and hands-on activities that would round out this study and deepen our level of understanding for the subject area. As there were limited kits and books on what I was specifically looking for, I ended up coming up with a few projects similar to ones we’ve done for other blocks.

Our Fall 2024 Homeschool Haul is primarily composed of books and resources for our two upcoming units of Chemistry and Anatomy. I have separate videos for Anatomy (both the Waldorf approach and a unit study approach) and Chemistry (both the Waldorf approach and a unit study approach).

Enjoy these late additions to our homeschool haul! These are a few items I purchased for our Anatomy and Chemistry Main lesson blocks with the exception of Oceanarium which I plan to use for our opening activities.

These are the books and resources I'm using to put together our Waldorf Main Lesson Block for Chemistry starting in grade 7 and continuing to grade 8. While I recommend 1-2 chemistry resource books for the teacher to familiarize herself with scientific concepts, this is not meant to be used in delivering the lesson or for the student.

What's the difference between Waldorf chemistry resources and these resources? Primarily, it's in the scientific content. You'll find all the science that's been discovered through years and years of science exploration in chemistry and beyond collected and organized in the following resources. You will also find experiment suggestions.

Chalk drawings are a quintessential part of Waldorf Main Lesson Blocks, but you don't need to do a large scale drawing. While I have used my 4 foot by 6 foot chalkboard, I have made them on smaller boards or more often done drawings in a Main lesson book with my student.

As we continue with our Chemistry Main Lesson Block, I added another chalk drawing for this new section we are covering. I've switched resources at this point to focus on the labs from the book Chemistry the Waldorf Way by Roberto Trostli A Manual for Teachers Grades 7-8.

It's not typical for me to have multiple chalk drawings for one main lesson block, but in this case, we already have three! In our previous chalk drawing, I included a chart on the difference between chemical and physical changes which ended up being an informative chalk drawing that we referred to often.

You might look at the watercolor of blue 'water' and think, "That's easy", and you're right, that's easy looking and doesn't seem to require any special skills, but our artistic representation of this first lesson in Chemistry: An Introduction to the chemical processes, took longer than expected and was harder to do than you'd think.

The introduction to combustion was a beautiful imaginative story that gentle wove together concepts that were learned in the previous years in the mineralogy and botany main lesson blocks. Call backs to zoology were made as well, though more subtly.

In this lesson for chemistry, we finally dive into our first demonstration. This demonstration involves seeing how long a candle flame burns within a glass jar. For this demonstration, we used a pint sized jar, a quart and 1/2 gallon mason jar.

While we did not do this demonstrations quite as advised in the Live Education curriculum (suggested burning material on a metal plate over a fire), we did collect a number of organic and non organic materials to burn over the flame of a candle. We avoided synthetic material except a small piece of faux leather.

In a Waldorf setting, the physics and chemistry lessons in which demonstrations are performed are experienced in the following way: The demonstration apparatus and materials are removed or covered directly after the demonstration is complete.

We are repeating a demonstration. We previously did earlier in the year for two reasons. The first reason is that we did this demonstration incorrectly. Not entirely incorrectly, but some of it was done incorrectly.

In this chemistry demonstration, we observe how wax liquifies, combusts, produces heat and light and finally, produces smoke which contains unburnt carbon from the wax. We collected the soot on the bottom of a glass.

In this Waldorf chemistry demonstration using the chemistry main lesson book by Live Education, we observe the thrilling phenomenon of a candle being relit from the smoke when a lit match comes in contact with the wax vapor.

Sometimes a lab doesn't go as planned. In this case, our Wax is Flammable demonstration didn't produce the expected results. We troubleshooted the problem over a couple days but could not get the wax vapors to travel through the glass tube effectively enough to ignite with a lit match on the other end.

Did you know that combustion produces heat, light, carbon dioxide and water vapor? All four may be observed through the combustion process if you know what to look for and how to test for it. In this chemistry demonstration using the Live Education Waldorf curriculum, we are observing the production of water vapor as a result of combustion.

In this lesson on burning refined fuels, we are using acetone and alcohol. This demonstration is a little bit different than the write up we did for this lesson. We opted to do the demonstration on burning biomass in conjunction with this demonstration, even though they are two separate lessons.

DId you know you can use a gas to extinguish a fire? Not just any gas though. If you fan a flame, you increase its burning as you introduce oxygen. But once the oxygen (or fuel source) is consumed, the fire is extinguished. As we experienced in early demonstrations, a fire may consume all the oxygen in a container, and extinguish itself because the oxygen has been consumed.

Physical changes are ones that may be reversed through filtration, distillation, evaporation, freezing, melting, heating, cooling and more. No new products are made when a physical changes occurs, though there may be changes in size, shape, density or texture.

Chemical changes are ones in which new products are formed with new properties. Chemical changes are not reversible; they are permanent and the original materials may not be recovered. Chemical changes may produce or absorb energy.

As we move into our second topic within our Waldorf Chemistry Main Lesson Block, we explore chemical reactions that are either endothermic or exothermic. For this demonstration, we observed what happened when we mixed sodium hydroxide with water.

There's one demonstration that can serve three lessons (and probably more!) and that's mixing vinegar with baking soda. It's a simple demonstration that's safe with materials that are easily accessible.

Testing how acidic or basic a substance is using red cabbage juice is a beautiful and exciting chemistry demonstration as the purple juice may change subtly or dramatically when substances like lemon juice or bleach are added. Red cabbage juice can be used as pH indicator as it changes colors depending on whether the substance is an acid or base.