After reading the passage once, the question of what substances are elements could be put to the class. No doubt some substances such as water will be listed that are basic compounds, and not true elements. These answers can then be used to illustrate the interaction of atoms and elements to create other substances that are not pure elements. At the same time, this will help illustrate the way different elements can form different substances depending on atomic structure. This in turn leads into Fermi and the splitting of an atom.
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Students can also be asked to explain how magnets work; this discussion will take a familiar phenomenon and apply it to the way atoms and some substances are held together (by the opposite attraction of protons and electrons). These questions and the continual linking -- by the students themselves, through open ending questioning -- of these new concepts to things familiar to the students' everyday lives, will help to make this passage and its implications in the wider world clear.
