Inside the Classify Elements 5E Lesson
The 5E instructional model walks students through five phases: Engage, Explore, Explain, Elaborate, and Evaluate. It flips the traditional lecture-first sequence on its head. Students explore a concept hands-on before you ever explain it, which means by the time you do explain it, they have something to hook the vocabulary onto.
I switched to the 5E model years ago and stopped going back. Kids retain more, ask better questions, and stop staring at me waiting to be told the answer. The Classify Elements 5E Lesson is built on this framework from start to finish. Here's how it plays out across the five phases.
🎯 Engage
📷 Engage image — objective slide OR word wall card
Day one is a teacher-led "Who lives here?" activity using a large projected periodic table and student-sized printed versions. Students follow along with teacher directions: shade the metals, shade the nonmetals, shade the metalloids along the stair-step line, label hydrogen, and circle the noble gases. Then the game starts. The teacher calls out an element by name or symbol, students find it, and decide which neighborhood it lives in.
By the end of the period, kids have a color-coded table in their own hand and a working sense that the table is organized, not random. Nobody has heard a single property of metals lecture yet, and that's the point. They're walking into the rest of the unit with a map already drawn.
What's included in the Engage:
- Teacher directions for the "Who lives here?" activity
- Printable student periodic table for color-coding
- Answer key for the discussion questions
- Four learning objective slides (standard verbatim, "Classify" highlighted, "I CAN...", and "WE WILL...")
- An illustrated Chemistry Word Wall in English and Spanish covering the full unit vocabulary
🔬 Explore
📷 Explore image 1 — wide shot of Station Lab in action
The Classify Elements Station Lab is the heart of the Explore phase. Students rotate through 8 stations (plus a 9th challenge station for early finishers) over one class period. The Station Lab is split into four input stations (where kids take in new information) and four output stations (where they show what they learned).
The four input stations:
- 🎬 Watch It! — Students watch a short video that walks through metals, nonmetals, and metalloids with real-world examples, then answer guided questions.
- 📖 Read It! — A one-page reading passage at two differentiated reading levels, with a Spanish version included.
- 🔬 Explore It! — The hands-on heart of the lab. Students test a small set of element samples or analog substitutes (a piece of copper wire, aluminum foil, a graphite pencil tip, sulfur or another nonmetal sample) for properties like luster, conductivity, and malleability.
- 💻 Research It! — Reference cards with the full periodic table, groups and periods, and a properties chart for metals, nonmetals, and metalloids.
The four output stations:
- 📋 Organize It! — A 12-card sort where students place real elements under the correct neighborhood: metal, nonmetal, or metalloid.
- 🎨 Illustrate It! — Students draw a labeled three-panel diagram showing a typical metal, a typical nonmetal, and a typical metalloid with their key properties.
- ✍️ Write It! — Three open-ended questions in complete sentences (this is where you find out who actually gets it).
- 📝 Assess It! — A short formative check with multiple choice and a fill-in-the-blank vocabulary paragraph.
📷 Explore image 2 — close-up of featured station (Explore It! or Organize It!)
Print and digital versions are both included. If you want the full breakdown of what happens at every single station, what students produce, and how to set it up, that's in our dedicated Station Lab post.
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Read the full Classify Elements Station Lab walkthrough
8 stations, materials list, teacher tips
The Station Lab is included in the full 5E lesson. You don't need to buy it separately if you're getting the whole unit.
📚 Explain
📷 Explain image 1 — Presentation slide screenshot
Here's the payoff of doing the Engage and Explore before the Explain: by the time kids hit this phase, they've already mapped out the neighborhoods and tested sample properties with their own hands. They have a working framework before you ever start naming things. The discussions get sharper, the questions get better, and you spend less time defining and more time pushing their thinking.
The Classify Elements Presentation walks 6th graders through the full scope of TEKS 6.6C, one concept at a time. The deck opens by establishing how the periodic table is organized: groups (the vertical columns, also called families) hold elements with similar properties, and periods (the horizontal rows) show patterns from left to right. From there the deck zooms in on each major category.
📷 Explain image (middle) — Presentation slide screenshot (classification hierarchy, Essential Question, or category comparison)
Students learn that metals sit on the left side and middle of the table and share a common set of physical properties: they're shiny (have luster), conduct heat and electricity, can be bent or hammered into shape without breaking (malleable), and can be drawn into wire (ductile). Iron, copper, aluminum, gold, and silver are the everyday examples kids already know. The deck also pushes against a common stereotype that all metals are hard solids by introducing mercury (a liquid metal), sodium (soft enough to cut with a butter knife), and gallium (melts in your hand).
Nonmetals live on the upper-right side of the table and tend to be the opposite of metals: dull, poor conductors of heat and electricity, and brittle when they're solid. Many nonmetals are gases at room temperature (oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen, the noble gases), but plenty are solids (carbon as graphite or diamond, sulfur as a yellow powder), and bromine is a reddish-brown liquid. Metalloids sit along the stair-step line and show a mix of metal and nonmetal properties. Silicon is the classic example. It looks shiny like a metal but doesn't conduct electricity the way a real metal does, which is exactly what makes it useful in computer chips.
📷 Explain image 2 — Presentation slide screenshot
The deck also introduces a few of the most famous families students should recognize by name: the alkali metals (Group 1, super reactive metals like sodium and potassium), the halogens (Group 17, reactive nonmetals like chlorine and fluorine), and the noble gases (Group 18, unreactive gases like helium, neon, and argon). For every category, students see the same comparison framework on screen: a position on the table, key properties, and a real-world example. That repeating pattern is what bakes the "classify" verb of TEKS 6.6C into long-term memory.
What makes this deck different from a typical chemistry slideshow is that kids are doing something on almost every slide. "Your answer:" prompts appear regularly, Brain Breaks reset attention, Quick Action INB tasks (a periodic-table neighborhood sort, an "is it a metal?" properties decision tree, a noble-gas vs alkali-metal compare and contrast) keep students engaged, and Think About It prompts push deeper into bigger ideas like why noble gases are used in light-up signs. The deck closes with a Check for Understanding tied back to the Essential Question: How can we classify elements using the organization of the periodic table?
The Explain materials in this product include:
- An editable 25-slide Presentation at two differentiated levels (Dependent and Modified), works in PowerPoint or Google Slides
- A guided fill-in-the-blank student notes handout that mirrors the Presentation, with answer key
- A Paper Interactive Notebook (English and Spanish) students cut, fold, and glue into their notebooks
- A Digital Interactive Notebook at both levels with answer keys, for 1:1 classrooms or Google Classroom
The Explain runs across two class periods. The Think About It prompts are where the real discussion happens, so let those breathe.
🛠️ Elaborate
📷 Elaborate image — Student Choice Project board or sample student work
The Elaborate phase is where students take what they learned about classifying elements and apply it to a project of their own choosing. In this 6th grade chemistry lesson, that's a Student Choice Project board with six different project options plus a "design your own" pathway.
Students might design a real-estate brochure selling a "home" in one of the periodic-table neighborhoods, build a trading-card set for the most useful metals, nonmetals, and metalloids in modern technology, or create a video tour of the table where they highlight three properties of each major group. There are options for kids who love to write, kids who love to draw, kids who love to build, and kids who love to perform. Whatever the project, the point is the same: students apply metals, nonmetals, and metalloids to a real-world artifact instead of a worksheet.
Choice is the whole point. By letting students pick how they show their thinking, you get more authentic work for TEKS 6.6C and you actually get to see what they understand about how the periodic table organizes the elements.
The rubric (the part teachers actually want)
Every project, no matter which option a student picks, is graded on the same rubric. Five categories at 20 points each: Vocabulary, Concepts, Presentation, Clarity, and Accuracy. The rubric uses a minus / check / plus shorthand on every row so you can grade a stack of projects quickly without re-reading every criterion.
Two differentiated versions in one file
The standard version is for students ready for independent application. The Reinforcement version is for students who need additional vocabulary or concept support. Three of the six options are swapped for projects with a tighter vocabulary tie-in, and "design your own" is replaced with "collaborate with the teacher" so kids aren't pitching cold.
✅ Evaluate
The Evaluate phase wraps the unit with a formal assessment. It's not all bubble-in. Several questions hand students a blank periodic table and ask them to label the major neighborhoods, identify mystery elements by property, and justify their thinking.
The full assessment has 12 questions across five formats:
- Multiple choice (4 questions) covering periodic table organization, properties of metals, nonmetals, and metalloids, and famous families
- Hotspot / visual (2 questions) where students circle the metalloid region or identify an element's neighborhood on a periodic table image
- Multiselect (2 questions) where students pick all properties that apply to metals (or nonmetals)
- Short answer (2 questions) on what the location of an element on the periodic table tells you about its properties
- Multipart scenario (2 questions) with a mystery element where students are given properties and have to predict its category and position on the table
A modified version is included for students who need additional support, with fewer multiple-choice distractors and sentence-starter scaffolds on the short-answer items.
If you've taught all five phases, this assessment shouldn't surprise anyone. It's a chance for kids to show you they get it.
