Conceptual Integrated Science

Please excuse this post. It is a mind dump to try and help me sort things out. I am teaching 9th-grade Conceptual Integrated Science this year. Not my favorite and it's my 4th prep on a subject I'm not really fond of. Of course, I have noticed that before. If it's not something I am super excited about or something that I can find resources for, I tend to devote very little time and energy to it. And that is what I'm finding myself doing now. So this is something I know that I do and something that I have to change. I need o coherent plan on what I'm going to teach for the remainder of this year. I can figure out how to teach it later, right now I just need to get my roadmap in place so I know what the heck I'm doing. So I spent the first quarter stumbling through physics and I've spent the last 2 weeks stumbling through chemistry. That is why I need to do this. I teach chemistry and I love chemistry, but I find myself stumbling through this because I don't know what exactly I want to teach. That changes now. One of the problems is that I'm trying to teach someone else's curriculum. That has to stop. I know chemistry, but I've only ever taught it as a year-long course. So I need to figure out what is important enough to be taught in one quarter or 9ish weeks. So let's begin..... I have already taught some of the periodic table. They know where the metals, non-metals, and metalloids are. We have touched on ions and valence electrons. And that is about it. So it is time to take a step back and regroup and start over. I can do that. I usually start chemistry with the scientific method, scientific notation, things like that, but since I already did that with CIS I can skip that part. Next, I usually cover atoms, elements, protons, neutrons, electrons, etc. I will cover electron configuration, periodicity, things like that. I have already covered some of these, I need to decide if I want to go further in depth or just move on from here. I have also done a little bit on states of matter. I could expand on this or just move on. After that, I will generally cover nomenclature. I'm pretty sure that I don't want to go into that in this class. This is a complex topic that can take weeks to cover so this I will definitely skip. So next would be an introduction to the mole concept. I'm thinking this might be a good thing to work on for a couple of classes as this is a brutal topic that most chemistry students struggle with. So this might be a good introduction to it. I could also use this as a good introduction to chemical formulas and counting atoms. This would provide a really good basis for chemistry when they get there. Then we could move into chemical reactions. We can learn a little about chemical equations and conservation of matter. We could also do a little on the various types of chemical reactions. We can look at combustion, precipitation, and any other cool reactions I can think of. We can do a class or two on nuclear energy and radioactivity and then a class or two on organic chemistry and set them up for biology. Okay, I feel better about this. I think I know what I'm going to do now. I just laid this out on a spreadsheet I use and realized that I only have 13 classes left with them. I've laid out a rough outline and now I'm going to try and flesh it out a little bit.