4th Sep '25

Schemes of Work

C2
- C2.5
  - Lesson 01 - Should we use plastic or paper bags? Lesson Plan Lesson Title
    - Humans use the Earth's resources to provide warmth, shelter, food and transport.
      - Suggested Activity:
        Think Pair Share
        Show picture of a carton of orange juice. Get students to think about all of the different materials that go into making that product and where they come from.
    - Natural resources, supplemented by agriculture, provide food, timber, clothing and fuels.
    - Finite resources from the Earth, oceans and atmosphere are processed to provide energy and materials.
    - Chemistry plays an important role in improving agricultural and industrial processes to provide new products and in sustainable development, which is development that meets the needs of current generations without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.
      - Suggested Activity:
        Analyse data as to estimates of how long different resources will last.
        
        What options do we have and when they run out
    - Students should be able to state examples of natural products that are supplemented or replaced by agricultural and synthetic products.
      - Suggested Activity:
        Research examples of natural products that are supplemented or replaced by agricultural and synthetic products. (NYLON)
    - Students should be able to distinguish between finite and renewable resources given appropriate information.
    - Students should be able to extract and interpret information about resources from charts, graphs and tables.
    - Students should be able to use orders of magnitude to evaluate the significance of data.
    - Life cycle assessments (LCAs) are carried out to assess the environmental impact of products in each of these stages:
      - extracting and processing raw materials
      - manufacturing and packaging
      - use and operation during its lifetime
      - disposal at the end of its useful life, including transport and distribution at each stage.
      - Suggested Activity:
        TED talk LCA's:
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7F0DWjzq0U
    - Use of water, resources, energy sources and production of some wastes can be fairly easily quantified. Allocating numerical values to pollutant effects is less straightforward and requires value judgements, so LCA is not a purely objective process.
      - Suggested Activity:
        Carry out a simple comparative LCAs for shopping bags made from plastic and paper. Info on shared drive
    - Selective or abbreviated LCAs can be devised to evaluate a product but these can be misused to reach pre-determined conclusions, eg in support of claims for advertising purposes.
    - Students should be able to carry out simple comparative LCAs for shopping bags made from plastic and paper.
  - Lesson 02 - How can the three R's improve our future? Lesson Plan Lesson Title
    - The reduction in use, reuse and recycling of materials by end users reduces the use of limited resources, use of energy sources, waste and environmental impacts.
      - Suggested Activity:
        Recycling plastics (90's special)
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5p6Nk3SzcU
    - Metals, glass, building materials, clay ceramics and most plastics are produced from limited raw materials.
    - Much of the energy for the processes comes from limited resources.
    - Obtaining raw materials from the Earth by quarrying and mining causes environmental impacts.
      - Suggested Activity:
        Extended writing: Describe the environmental impacts of obtaining raw materials from the Earth.
    - Some products, such as glass bottles, can be reused. Glass bottles can be crushed and melted to make different glass products. Other products cannot be reused and so are recycled for a different use.
    - Metals can be recycled by melting and recasting or reforming into different products.
    - The amount of separation required for recycling depends on the material and the properties required of the final product. For example, some scrap steel can be added to iron from a blast furnace to reduce the amount of iron that needs to be extracted from iron ore.
    - Students should be able to evaluate ways of reducing the use of limited resources, given appropriate information.
      - Suggested Activity:
        Design an informative poster aimed at future generations to encourage them to recycle, reuse, reduce.
  - Lesson 03 - How is water made safe for human consumption? Lesson Plan Lesson Title
    - Water of appropriate quality is essential for life. For humans, drinking water should have sufficiently low levels of dissolved salts and microbes.
    - Urban lifestyles and industrial processes produce large amounts of waste water that require treatment before being released into the environment.
    - Water that is safe to drink is called potable water. Potable water is not pure water in the chemical sense because it contains dissolved substances.
      - Suggested Activity:
        Compare the composition of:
        • potable water
        • pure water.
        
        Why do we not drink pure water?
    - Sewage and agricultural waste water require removal of organic matter and harmful microbes. Industrial waste water may require removal of organic matter and harmful chemicals.
      - Suggested Activity:
        Treating waste water:
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YW6GBciRHLg
    - The methods used to produce potable water depend on available supplies of water and local conditions.
    - Sewage treatment includes:
      ? screening and grit removal
      ? sedimentation to produce sewage sludge and effluent
      ? anaerobic digestion of sewage sludge
      ? aerobic biological treatment of effluent.
    - In the United Kingdom (UK), rain provides water with low levels of dissolved substances (fresh water) that collects in the ground and in lakes and rivers, and most potable water is produced by:
      - choosing an appropriate source of fresh water
      - passing the water through filter beds
      - sterilising.
    - Students should be able to comment on the relative ease of obtaining potable water from waste, ground and salt water.
    - Sterilising agents used for potable water include chlorine, ozone or ultraviolet light.
      - Suggested Activity:
        Thinking task:
        Task students with coming up with a solution to supplying water to a city that only has access to salt water (such as Dubai).
        
        Review ideas and then go through distillation and osmosis.
    - If supplies of fresh water are limited, desalination of salty water or sea water may be required.
    - Desalination can be done by distillation or
      by processes that use membranes such as reverse osmosis.
      - Suggested Activity:
        Extended writing: Describe the process of desalination.
        or
        Describe the process of distillation
        or
        Explain how distillation separates substances.
    - These processes require large amounts of energy.
    - Students should be able to distinguish between potable water and pure water.
      - Suggested Activity:
        Think/Pair/Share
        Why do we not drink pure water?
    - Students should be able to describe the differences in treatment of ground water and salty water.
    - Students should be able to give reasons for the steps used to produce potable water.
  - Lesson 04 - Required practical - how is potable water made? Lesson Plan Lesson Title
    - Students should be able to carry out analysis and purification of water samples from different sources, including pH, dissolved solids and distillation.
    - Required practical 8 - purifying water (AT skills 2,3,4)
  - Lesson 05 - How can we extract metals from low grade ores? Lesson Plan Lesson Title
    - The Earth?s resources of metal ores are limited.
    - Copper ores are becoming scarce and new ways of extracting copper from low-grade ores include phytomining, and bioleaching.
      - Suggested Activity:
        Think/Pair/Share
        Demand for copper continues to increase, but the Earth's supplies are dwindling. How could we overcome this?
        
        Bioleaching and Phytomining
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XF399zN36LE
    - These methods avoid traditional mining methods of digging, moving and disposing of large amounts of rock.
    - Phytomining uses plants to absorb metal compounds. The plants are harvested and then burned to produce ash that contains metal compounds.
      - Suggested Activity:
        Create a cartoon story board: Process of phytomining.
    - Bioleaching uses bacteria to produce leachate solutions that contain metal compounds.
      - Suggested Activity:
        Bioleaching:
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLeLPYUeCH8
    - The metal compounds can be processed to obtain the metal. For example, copper can be obtained from solutions of copper compounds by displacement using scrap iron or by electrolysis.
      - Suggested Activity:
        Opportunity to recap methods of extracting metals from their ores
    - Students should be able to evaluate alternative biological methods of metal extraction, given appropriate information.
  - Lesson 06 - What are NPK fertilisers? Lesson Plan Lesson Title
    - Ammonia can be used to manufacture ammonium salts and nitric acid.
    - Students should be able to recall the names of the salts produced when phosphate rock is treated with nitric acid, sulfuric acid and phosphoric acid
    - Potassium chloride, potassium sulfate and phosphate rock are obtained by mining, but phosphate rock cannot be used directly as a fertiliser
    - Phosphate rock is treated with nitric acid or sulfuric acid to produce soluble salts that can be used as fertilisers.
    - (HT only) Students should be able to:
      interpret graphs of reaction conditions versus rate
    - Students should be able to compare the industrial production of fertilisers with laboratory preparations of the same compounds, given appropriate information
    - Compounds of nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium are used as fertilisers to improve agricultural productivity. NPK fertilisers contain compounds of all three elements.
    - Industrial production of NPK fertilisers can be achieved using a variety of raw materials in several integrated processes
    - NPK fertilisers are formulations of various salts containing appropriate percentages of the elements.
  - Lesson 07 - Lesson Plan Lesson Title