I am a relatively new teacher in Chemistry, and every year I seem to have the same conceptual struggles with the bonding properties of water. My students may feel confident in the concept the water is covalently bonded with a dipole nature that allows it to create hydrogen bonds and exhibit unique properties like surface tension and adhesion. Then we start introducing the self-ionization properties of water and acid-base chemistry concepts, and they seem to go into mental melt-down. How is water capable of both covalent and ionic bonding . . . and are there other molecules that do this as well? Does anyone have any reliable teaching tools or descriptive activities that can help my students (and myself) better understand these mysterious properties of water?? I would gladly take any resources being offered!
The ability of water to form hydrogen bonds is well understood now. Almost every molecule can do similar intra- and inter molecular bonds. Water can do this under ambient conditions that we live on whereas H2S does it at much lower temperatures. You may look at some of these references where I have discussed these in more details.
http://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlehtml/2015/fd/c4fd00167b
Dynamics of the chemical bond: inter- and intra-molecular hydrogen bond - Faraday Discussions (RSC Publishing)
Hydrogen bonding vs dipole-dipole interactions
http://www.ias.ac.in/resonance/Volumes/19/08/0704-0712.pdf
Hydrogen bonding vs van der Waals interactions
http://dx.doi.org/10.1039/B907708A
And some perspective on intermolecular bonds
http://dx.doi.org/10.1039/C4CP02585G
and a news story
http://www.currentscience.ac.in/Volumes/105/07/0892.pdf