This activity is designed to help students understand and learn symbols for chemical elements. This is mostly a suggestion for ways to explain chemical symbols to students and ways to have the students practice matching the symbols to the names so they can become familiar with the symbols for common elements. Symbols are used to abbreviate the names of the elements. These symbols are then used when writing chemical formulas for compounds.
Procedure Have a general discussion with students about abbreviations of words in general.
Maybe brainstorm as a class and write complete words with the abbreviations next to them. Talk about where these abbreviations come from. Most of them will come from letters actually contained within the word. Call on several students to come up to the board and write their first initial. Lead the students to the fact that we wouldn't be able to identify each person by just one initial.