Friday, October 1, 2010

Friday October 1, 2010

Today we started out our day as we always do, we went over the previous nights’ blog and recapped all the important ideas we learned yesterday. We also got a quick preview of the sodium experiment we were going to do during today’s class period.

After we finished going over the blog Mr. Henderson told us to open up our packets to page five. This page was going to help us learn about ions. Ions are negatively or positively charged particles. In other words anything with a charge is considered an ion. There are two types of ions: Cantions, which are positive and have more protons then elections, and Anions, which are negative and have more elections then protons. Mr. Henderson gave us a great way of remembering which one is which, for Anion he told us, A N Ions, which stands for A= a, N=negative, Ions=ion, so a negative ion! Also, all metals tend to form positive ions and all non-metals tend to form negative ions.

In the worksheet there was some hard questions with multiple answers that seemed right but really weren’t. For example, in numbers 3 and 4 we are given 6 answers to choose from, but Mr. Henderson made it easy. He gave us an easy way to make some answers obviously wrong. He said that, splitting nucleuses causes atomic bombs so obviously that’s not what an ion is. But, splitting elections is. So in numbers 3 and 4, four of the answers are wrong at first sight since they say losing a proton, gaining a proton etc. So were left with two answers for each question which makes it twice as easy to pick the right one.

For number five Mr. Henderson told us that “Atoms of most elements want to be like HeNeArKrXeRn.” Therefore when looking for the charges of atoms, all you have to do is either subtract the atomic number to make one of the atoms in group 18 or add to the atomic number to make one. This makes making ions so much easier.

For today we skipped number six. But we did half of number seven and left the last two for Monday. Number seven is an easy practice question which we have done on page two and gotten a lot of practice on it. But this time there’s a twist, you add ions. When writing an ion you write the charge (+,-) then the number, for example the first element we do is magnesium-24 ion. The isotopic symbol is ₁₂²⁴Mg⁺².

After doing page 5 Mr. Henderson showed us by far one of the coolest demos we have ever done. It was dropping sodium in water, and it made for a great show. The sodium, which is highly reactive in water since it is in group one, started fizzing and going in a circle. It was really cool.

In the first picture Mr. Henderson showed us what sodium looks like when it comes out of the container. It was a little rusty looking and defiantly not shiny.

In the second picture Mr. Henderson demonstrates how sodium “cuts like butter”.

In the third picture after cutting the sodium, it is REALLY shiny and nice looking.

Here is a link to the video so you can see exactly what happened, remember the password to sign in is gbs. http://www.dropshots.com/chemistryclassroom#date/2010-09-30/21:41:02

After these fun activities we finished the class with a couple videos and Mr. Henderson giving us a preview of the homework and of what we’re going to do on Monday.

The first video we showed was http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDMUb5mQsjo. That video showed a not so exciting Caesium in water video from the funny haired guy. Since the reaction was not so exciting the whole class decided to watch a better reaction, which was http://www.youtube.com/user/periodicvideos#p/search/6/5aD6HwUE2c0. That gave off a VERY big reaction and was sufficient for our curiosity.

After the videos Mr. Henderson told us we are officially done with section four and sections 5 and 6 are going to take a week or a little more after that. During next week, on Tuesday and Wednesday we are going to be in the computer lab. We are going to be working on lab 4, which Mr. Henderson is going to explain, and on web assigns that we have not completed yet.

In lab number four we have a lot of data to get; since we are done in the back of the room with this lab Mr. Henderson was nice enough to record the rest of the data on t

he homepage of his chemistry honors website. It is located under the title “Help is Hear!” That recording will help you with the rest of the lab, but we will be doing that on Wednesday and Thursday.

Finally Mr. Henderson finished the exciting day in the chemistry room. The homework for next time was a web assign due Monday on chapter 2.4, and an ongoing assignment to complete your lab notebook, which is due Friday.

If you need any help on ions I recommend these two websites. In the first site they help with naming the ions, which you will learn in chapters 2.

5 and 2.6 but if you would like to get a head start this site is a good preview. In the second website there is a magnificent review of how to figure out the charges of ions and how to make compounds neutral. I defiantly recommend the second website for a review for the test.

http://www.mpcfaculty.net/mark_bishop/ionic_nomenclature_help.htm

http://www.wisc-online.com/objects/ViewObject.aspx?ID=gch2104