By Jen Rodgers, 8th Grade Science Teacher Last summer I attended RAFT’s two-day "Innovation Institute." It would take several posts to share with you everything I learned and was able to apply to my classroom. However I would like to share one activity with you this time, and how I adapted this to teach a concept in my class. I teach 8th grade science, and one of the standards we teach is how to use the Periodic Table of Elements and what the patterns are in the periodic table. We know how amazing the science is behind the Periodic Table of Elements. But translating that to 14 year olds and letting them discover how incredible it is that everything we know is made of these few elements that share so many characteristics and all fall into this pattern is no small feat. We teach them about groups and periods, valence electrons, metals and nonmetals, and how the characteristics follow a pattern and why. Using RAFT’s Idea Sheet “Thinking on the Outside of the Box”