To spread a little Christmas cheer, why not add a chemis-tree to your lab this year? Making a chemis-tree to decorate your classroom is a great way of combining chemistry with Christmas. Read on for some ideas on how you can make your own.
Image: Matt Hartings
Making a chemis-tree
The basic scaffold for the traditional chemis-tree is a retort stand to which you add clamps to represent the branches. You can add various different decorations to the clamps.
Baubles
Fill different sized round-bottomed flasks with colourful solutions. Make sure the flasks are securely sealed with corks and then attach them to the clamps.
You could make up salt solutions and then ask the students to do some research to name the metal ions in each one (nickel for green, copper for blue, chromate for yellow, dichromate for orange, and permanganate for purple).
Students could make up their own baubles by mixing universal indicator with liquids of different pHs. Assign each pair of students a different colour and allow them to choose the correct liquid to use. To make this a bit harder, you could also supply a choice of different indicators.
Decorations
Image: University of York Chemistry Society
Students could decorate the tree with chromatography snowflakes (read the instructions in the article Christmas science – studying snowflakes). They could create their own ‘snowflakes’ by leaving pipe-cleaners bent into a star shape in saturated solutions of sodium chloride or sugar. Crystals will form on the pipe-cleaners.
You could give students molymods and ask them to make different compounds which can be used to decorate the tree.
Students from year 9 and up can perform electroplating. Supply students with a small piece of copper sheet with a hole drilled into the top and allow them to use masking tape to create a pattern on the surface. They can then carry out the procedure which deposits a layer of zinc onto the surface (click here for more details). When they remove the tape they will see their pattern.
You could demonstrate the Tollen’s test to silver test tubes – see more details here.
More Festive Science
For some ideas of Christmas experiments to do at home over the holidays take a look at the article Christmas science: experiments to do at home
Image credits: Matthew Hartings Professor of Chemistry at American University
University of York Chemistry Society (image); University of York Chemistry Department (setup)