Friday, October 1

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.}

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.

Mr. Henderson demonstrates how sodium “cuts like butter”.

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 the 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 Tuesday and Wednesday.

 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 definitely 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

 

 

 

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Tuesday September 28, 2010.

Today Mr. Henderson started out the class by reviewing last nights scribe's blog. He went over all the plus points of it and went into further detail on how the blog reviewed what we did in class the previous day. He also talked about the 5 postulates. He then told us a little about what we were going to do today in class. Today in class our main goal was to learn about the atomic structure, atomic number, and the mass number.He then started to review page one in the packet. We went over most of it yesterday but we finished up today. We talked about how the Dalton theory of an atom was just a circle with the element name inside. There was no proposed structure to it. The JJ Thomson theory of an atom was that it looked like plum pudding. The Rutherford theory was that positive charges were concentrated in the nucleus which was in the center of the atom and then the electrons surrounded the empty space outside the nucleus. Bohr's theory of the atomic structure was that electrons are in orbit around the nucleus. Bohr's structure also only worked for hydrogen.The picture on the left shows these structures.

Before we continued our lesson on the atomic structure, Mr. H gave us a demonstration on how the cathode rays work. He gave us a little background information on who and how it started. In 1896 British physicist J.J Thomson showed the rays were composed of a previously unknown charged particle, which was later named the electron. The first picture shows the cathode ray empty. After putting some electricity conductivity you see a neon greenish light go through the tube. The second picture shows what happened when the electricity is conducted through the cathode tube and a magnet is put on top. The ray is reflexed to the top when the positive side of the magnet is put up. The third picture shows the same thing as in picture two just a variation. Picture number four is what the cathode ray looks like when the negative side of the magnet is put above it. Picture five is just what the cathode ray looks like when electricity is conducted through it.

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

After the completion of page one, and the demonstration, Mr.H gave us a little lesson on the atomic structure and there were notes on the board so we could follow along. The notes basically summarized everything that we needed to know to do page number two. The atomic number is the number

of protons plus the number of electrons. It is the identifying property of what the element is. The mass number is the number of protons plus the number neutrons. The mass number is on top and the atomic number is on the bottom as showed in the picture. On the other side of the atomic symbol there would be either a +, -, or no sign there. This determines the charge of the electron and the over all change. It also determines whether it is a positive, negative, or neutral charge. The symbol and the subscript go together. We then continued to talk about isotopes. Isotopes are different types of atoms of the same chemical element, each having a different number of neutrons. They also differ in mass but never in atomic number. The number of protons is the same because that is what characterizes a chemical element. We took the element carbon as an example. On the periodic table when you see the element carbon, you see its atomic symbol, the number of electrons its has, and you see a number at the bottom called the super script. The super script is the average of the mass number of the atomic element. For carbon on the periodic table it shows 12.01. This means that the most abundant isotope of carbon has a mass of 12.01. Mr. H then explained the different between an Ion and an Atom. An Ion is a charged particle while an atom is a neutral particle.

We then turned to page to and completed the chart. The chart helped practicing important skills such as knowing how to find the atomic number and the atomic mass and the number of protons and neutrons and the number of electrons of any given element. Here are the answers to the chart.

The last ten minutes of class we reviewed our unit one tests. Mr. H went over the frequently missed problems. He went into much detail on why these problems were wrong. Toward the end of class he passed out a sheet of paper called the "Mendeleev For a Day." There are 20 squares on this paper that you need to cut out for tomorrows class to play the game! Cant wait!

Friday, September 26

Today’s class was very . Mr. Henderson was not in class today, so we had a substitute. Our class began when Mr. Doody from the TLC came to talk to our class. He told us about how great the TLC is for helping with chemistry, as well as all other classes offered at GBS. Mr. Doody also advised us to frequently use the textbook as a study tool and not to spend more than ten minutes on a problem. We then went to the computer lab to do the Rutherford Simulation Lab, which is a computer activity. We were given a sheet that gave us all of the directions for the lab. We went to the website http://phet.colorado.edu/simulations for the lab, which was completed in our lab notebooks. After completing this lab, we went to http://www.blogger.com/chemthink.com to do the atomic structure tutorial. After completing the tutorial, we filled out a table on the lab sheet.

The answers should look like this:

Once we completed the lab, we were supposed to cut the table and put it into the left side of our lab notebooks. For homework, we had to finish the lab if we had not already in class.

Today’s class was very productive!

Wednesday, September 22

Today’s chemistry class was very interesting. The period was shortened due to late arrival, but we managed to learn so much! We started out the day a little differently than usual by getting our lab notebooks back. Although we turned them in on Tuesday, Mr. H worked through them quickly to get them back to us before our test. On the subject of the test, Mr. H would like to remind everyone that the Unit 1 test will be on Thursday, September 23. He explained to us how the test would be 35 multiple choice and 3 short answer questions. One student asked questions about knowing labs for the test, and Mr. H reassured us that knowing specific details from labs was not necessary. Mr. H also gave us some very great advice regarding studying for the test. He said that if we signed onto our moodle account and went to the Chemistry Honors 173 Metacourse that we would find some great test preparation worksheets. I did this and found that they were incredibly helpful. One other resource that Mr. H hopes we will use to study are the links on the Delicious page. If you go to the class website, you will find some links to those articles.

The next activity we did in class was to talk about the previous nights Webassign. Many students, myself included, noticed how some of the questions on the Webassign were particularly difficult, namely the last problem. It was requested that we go over that problem, so Mr. H generously took about 5 minutes to explain it. Here is the work that was done:

After explaining the problem, Mr. H went on to say that spending more than 30 minutes a night on a Webassign was unneeded. He explained how missing one question on one Webassign for one night for one unit for one semester was completely okay. He also added how sometimes he will make a Webassign less points than he originally planned, like making a 10 point Webassign into a 7 point Webassign.

After the Webassign talk, we went over Kyle’s blog from the previous day. Mr. H was very impressed by how thorough his blog was.

After this, Mr. H asked us to take out our new unit packets, and thus we started unit 2. This packet is titled Atoms, Molecules, and Ions. It has a picture of the periodic table on the front page. We then proceeded to begin lab AMI1: Probing the Black Box. Each group of two was given a small circular box with a silver ball inside. Our job was to figure out the structure inside of that mystery box. Some possible structures were:

or

or

For this lab, we were told to only fill out the purpose and the data section with a picture of what we thought the inside of the mystery box looked like. Mr. H said that we would do a conclusion section as a class on either Friday or Monday. The class ended here, and as we gathered our belongings, Mr. H reminded very animatedly to study for our test the next day. Today’s class was very productive and fun!