Bonding Sticker Practice

3/14/2022

Recently I feel like I've been in a slump in our bonding nomenclature unit. We do lots of practice and students have many opportunities to see and practice the content, but I'm still having trouble helping all of my students engage in the task and slow down to look at the compound to know what rules to use.

In an effort to make this process feel more hands on, I made some custom stickers out of printable address labels. For each compound in this activity, students are asked to identify if they are are Ionic or Covalent and if they are Ionic, whether or not they contain a multivalent metal or polyatomic ion. Only after they have done this identification can they write out the formula or name the compound. :)

Stickers

I wanted the stickers for two purposes:

Slow students down and force them to identify the features of each compound
Provide specific reminders that would be assigned to each compound to help in the naming or writing of compounds

Because of this, I decided that I would need to make my own stickers to include the things that I wanted. It was hard to fit everything in such a small space so I had to make some decisions about what I wanted to include

Could this activity work just as well without stickers? Probably. But I don't think I would have had the same buy in without them ;)

I printed out the stickers on Avery printable address label sheets. I was able to fit three stickers per label and just cut them out into strip as shown in the picture above. With this, there are enough for three worksheets with some stickers left over

The sticker templates are designed for the 30-per-sheet Avery Address labels. These are relatively cheap on Amazon or any other store with office supplies.

The Activity

I did this activity in pairs to minimize the amount of stickers I would need. I gave each pair a worksheet and three strips of stickers (10 ionic, 5 covalent, 5 multivalent, and 5 polyatomic). I had them do the stickers first and then call me over to sign off before completing the final column.

Files

Below are the downloadable files for the Bonding Sticker Practice. The editable files are also included. This activity would be really easy to modify by swapping out the examples used

If you have any questions or ideas, leave a comment below :)