I've been thinking a lot in the last fortnight about how we help students connect pieces of information in order to build a body of knowledge. This is a key aspect of A level chemistry, particularly organic chemistry. For this part of the course students have to remember how to carry out a large number of different reactions: what chemicals do we add?, what temperature do we use?, what colour changes are there? Then in the examination they are given a molecule they have never seen before and are assessed on their application of their recall to this new scenario. Our job as chemistry teachers is to maintain their curiosity, help them develop a broad and deep factual knowledge base which they can draw upon quickly under pressure and give them the confidence to apply this in a novel situation. This weeks lesson was all about maintaining curiosity with one of my favourite demonstrations! We made a giant silver mirror by reacting glucose with a solution of silver ions at the end of a lesson in which the students had carried out the reaction on a smaller scale. We'll be following up in the next session with retrieving the reagents and conditions for the process and practising writing equations for unfamiliar molecules.