I guess one can make soap, as an applied project. Some paper chromatography can be done without a hood, outdoors (but then one still needs to dispose of the materials safely). Gall-based inks are, in a way, on the fence between organic and inorganic (also, playing around with homemade dyes is cool, e.g. from avocado seeds, alder bark or walnut skins—the colours fade, but you can stain paper so it looks old and then draw maps of treasure on it). Cooking is instructive (although people often underestimate the dangers of vinegar “because everybody has it in their kitchen”.) Also, blacklight might be fun here.
But my most engaged instructors told us a real chemist develops a “sense of substance”, like they often can tell things apart by their physical appearance and not even their chemical properties (given a set of familiar chemicals). There are different shades of colour, different granularities, different translucencies… it’s just not something you can show at home. And separately, my botany instructors said they always make a student identify at least three species of a genus, whenever possible. For triangulation. If you give students only one species, that’s how they will think of the genus as a whole. Give them two, and they will think about the differences between them, but not about the genus. But give them three, and they see the common features. Again, I don’t think it’s possible to show sufficient variety of chemical substances at home.
I guess one can make soap, as an applied project. Some paper chromatography can be done without a hood, outdoors (but then one still needs to dispose of the materials safely). Gall-based inks are, in a way, on the fence between organic and inorganic (also, playing around with homemade dyes is cool, e.g. from avocado seeds, alder bark or walnut skins—the colours fade, but you can stain paper so it looks old and then draw maps of treasure on it). Cooking is instructive (although people often underestimate the dangers of vinegar “because everybody has it in their kitchen”.) Also, blacklight might be fun here.
But my most engaged instructors told us a real chemist develops a “sense of substance”, like they often can tell things apart by their physical appearance and not even their chemical properties (given a set of familiar chemicals). There are different shades of colour, different granularities, different translucencies… it’s just not something you can show at home. And separately, my botany instructors said they always make a student identify at least three species of a genus, whenever possible. For triangulation. If you give students only one species, that’s how they will think of the genus as a whole. Give them two, and they will think about the differences between them, but not about the genus. But give them three, and they see the common features. Again, I don’t think it’s possible to show sufficient variety of chemical substances at home.