A few months ago there was a fantastic episode of NOVA called “Hunting the Elements”, detailing all the elements in the periodic table. My son absolutely adored it.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/physics/hunting-elements.html

So it gave me an idea for creating my own version of hunting the elements. I created an elemental scavenger hunt by painting the symbols for the elements onto milk caps.

I hide the caps in the yard and he will go find them. Sometimes I even call out a compound and ask him to go find only the elements that make up that certain compound. It is actually a lot of fun and is quite an effective way of remembering all the elements in the periodic table.

Most times we just end up sitting on the grass, making compounds out of our milk caps or we put the elements in order and try and recreate the periodic table by memory, we’re actually getting pretty good at it. By the summer we should have all 118 symbols to create the full periodic table.

Nellie