Drawing the Electron-Dot Formula for Water, H₂O

The first thing that you must do is to determine the number of electrons available for the formula?

Hydrogen is in column IA and thus has 1 electron. Since there are 2 hydrogen atoms, the total for hydrogen will be 2 electrons.

Oxygen is in column VIA and thus has 6 outer electrons...again remember that we don't use the atomic number for electron-dot formulas.

The total number of electrons for all atoms is 8. What do you do next?