Tell your students a story! Sit around the kitchen table in your virtual home, and regale them with tales about chemicals found in the home.

Start with the History of Salt from the Salt Institute. Try different roads from here. Go to the Importance of Salt to learn that in ancient times, salt (or the lack of it) could drastically affect the health of entire populations. Trade in salt was very important, and salt was valuable enough to be used as currency in some areas. Here your students will learn that in medieval Sweden, it took a pound of salt to preserve 10 pounds of butter.

Look at the various methods of obtaining salt. Wonderful photographs of evaporating ponds are found at The Saharan Salt Trade page. Go to the Web page of Cisne, a Brazilian brand of table salt, to learn that in ancient times salt was exchanged, gram per gram, for gold. Learn that the city of Halle, Germany occupies a site where salt was processed from the Hallstatt Period (ca. 750 to 450 B.C.E.). By the way, Halle is also the birthplace (in 1685) of the Baroque composer and musician Georg Friedrich Handel.

While sitting at the kitchen table, pour some salt from the nearby salt shaker. Feel the edges of the salt crystals. Go to the Smithsonian Magazine page to see more images of these crystals. Click on each image for further information and enlargement.

Now let's do some activities with your students at the kitchen table. From the U. S. Department of Education homepage, go to the Activity for Parents on Crystals. Table salt, ice, and sugar are examined under a magnifying glass. Another Parent Activity involves baking four small cakes, each missing a key ingredient.

What can your students learn from simple activities? They can learn to use their senses and how to proceed from experiment to conclusions. Students at MIT can enroll in a course named "Kitchen Chemistry". See the news release from MIT about "A Lesson in Leavening" to find out that adding an acid to baking soda will prevent bitter tasting baked goods. Kitchen chemistry is fun!

From cake to bread! Go to the Fleischman's Yeast Homepage . Here you can learn that the particular species of yeast called Saccharomyces cerevisiae is the one most commonly used for baking bread. Lots more about fermentation and baking at this site!

Now go to the Scientific American Explorations site on Kitchen Chemistry. Here your students can learn why bread rises but popovers pop. Great fun and food for thought!

Visit the Science Is Fun page of Bassam Z. Shakhashiri of University of Wisconsin-Madison for more experiments you can do at home. There are lots of ideas here and at other sites. Remember that safety should be addressed before attempting any of these activities.

And one of the best sources for kitchen activities is the JCE Classroom Activities from the Journal of Chemical Education, edited by Nancy S. Gettys and Erica K. Jacobsen. Go to Anthocyanins: A Colorful Class of Compounds for acid-base indicators made from another item in the kitchen, purple cabbage--my favorite kitchen chemistry experiment.