Tuesday May 31, 2011

Today we had a quick reminder that we are in fact still in school and not on vacation yet. We started off class with reading graces blog and going over concepts we learned Friday. Mr. Henderson made some announcements that the webassigns are no longer going to be graded, they are only for learning the material and going over what we learned in class. He also told us we aren't going to be using our lab notebooks anymore. We also got our quizzes back. Then we started on page two and three in our packets, after that a quick lab and the day was over.

On page two we learned a easy new concept, which we used notes on the board to help us with. First of all we learned that when something decays the left side and right side atomic number and mass number have to be equal. So when we do number 7A on page two we use the question to figure out what it decays to. We write out the isotopic symbol for it and obviously the atomic mass and atomic number are not equal. So we determine the difference and start writing a second isotopic symbol. We find out the elemental symbol from the notes on the board. Ex. Uranioum-238 decays to form Thorium 234. We already have uranium there ready for us so we start on Thorium. Thoriums' atomic number is 90 and its atomic mass number is 234. the difference in mass is 4 and the difference for atomic number is 2. Then from using the notes on the board we determine the elemental symbol which is helium and the decay type, which is alpha. we finished the page and moved on to page 3.

For page three Mr. Henderson had us in our lab groups do a certain number then go up to the board and tell the class the answer and how you did it. If you weren't there then sucks for you. But the way you do number one is almost the same way as on page two, except you have the decay type instead of the element it turns into. To figure these our you first write down the elemental symbol for the decay type and set each number (atomic number or mass number) equal and put an X for the missing element we dont know. Then using the PT we figure out the element with the atomic number. For number two its doing everything we just learned but in our heads. All you write down is the isotopic symbol for the element it decays into.

After that we did a quick lab, it was a lab to test if the farther you are away the less radiation you can get. Mr. Henderson had the radiation particle testers out for five minutes before we did our lab to get the background count, for mine it was 123 which we converted to 12 particles every ten seconds or so. We then tested the radation disc from a couple slots under the detector. My data was : 7492, 2385, 1101, 673 and 417. but we then had to subtract the background radiation number which made my data: 7480, 2373, 1089, 661 and 405. We then plotted the data on a little graph and wrote the conclusion.

That was our great day in chemistry. byebye