mum Posted August 19, 2010 Share Posted August 19, 2010 Anyone have a good method? Are there any good songs of the elements IN ORDER? Any other helps? Thanks! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
emubird Posted August 19, 2010 Share Posted August 19, 2010 What's the reason for memorizing it? Although a lot of chemists might know where a lot of the elements go, I don't hear about them actually sitting down and memorizing. It just comes with time. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ester Maria Posted August 19, 2010 Share Posted August 19, 2010 What's the reason for memorizing it? Although a lot of chemists might know where a lot of the elements go, I don't hear about them actually sitting down and memorizing. It just comes with time. Yep. My husband is a chemist, and he never intentionally sat down to memorize the periodic table. It comes with time since you see it all. the. time. when you study Chemistry. My daughter has a glass top table and she put this HUGE periodic table (like a wall poster) beneath the glass, and she sometimes switches to work there. Not that having a huge periodic table covered by textbooks is particularly helpful, but subconsciously, I guess you learn it quicker the more you see it. You can try with wall posters, wallpapers on computer, etc. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
regentrude Posted August 19, 2010 Share Posted August 19, 2010 Don't see any reason to memorize the whole periodic table- but if I was trying to, I would not go by numerical order, but by group. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chris in VA Posted August 19, 2010 Share Posted August 19, 2010 Ellen McHenry's The Elements does this, but it isn't high school level. There's always . Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ChemMommy Posted August 20, 2010 Share Posted August 20, 2010 I don't have my students at the college learn the order, just the names, spellings, and symbols. And they only learn the ones in the big section (s, d, and p-block), not the two rows at the bottom. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
distancia Posted August 20, 2010 Share Posted August 20, 2010 I have several high school and college chemistry textbooks on hand and ALL of them suggest that the reader (student) learn the most common elements (it's usually list of about 30-40). I would think flashcards would be the way to go. BTW, when I was in middle school (8th grade) our Science teacher made us memorize a table of 31. He said we would thank him when we got to Chemistry. I never had the opportunity to thank him but I was thankful that I had learned them because they made my comprehension of learning a solution that much easier. My husband, a chemist turned patent-attorney, said he, too, was made to learn the more common elements when he was in high school. Of course, that was back in the dark ages of the 1960s. Hubby will be in charge of teaching our daughter Chem this year and he said he is going to have her memorize the table of 39, 2 of them per day, which will work out to little under 3 weeks. He said it is a major timesaver considering the short amount of time put into it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
EKS Posted August 20, 2010 Share Posted August 20, 2010 There is no need to memorize the periodic table. Learning the trends is far more important. A student will quickly learn the most common elements and where they are by simply doing lots of problems. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ma23peas Posted August 20, 2010 Share Posted August 20, 2010 Interestingly, just had a discussion about this with a high school senior...her high school teacher made them memorize the entire periodic table..I was sitting there wondering why a teacher would make the kids do that when the many and varied equations in Chemistry should be tried and tried again...I would not waste my time memorizing any elements, but I would strongly focus on electron configuration, Boyle's Law, and others using common elements and even not so common elements so they know how to work their way around a periodic table... Tara Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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