Week 12 Reflection

Week 12 already! Its incredible how time flies in honors chemistry.  This week, our learning was focused on energy and how to represent it.  We started with Phase Diagrams.  To my surprise I understood them fairly quickly.  To me, they looked extremely complicated, but all I had to really do was break them down into pieces so they were not as bad. These diagrams are actually really helpful to our learning because we can find what phase a substance is in based on the pressure and temperature.  This helps us in a lot of ways because not only can we see the phase changes but we can see the gradual or more drastic the change is based on these factors.  I also like the new work book type sheets we use for skill practice because it's easy to look back on later and still understand.  This week we also practiced with specific heat. We also looked at heat capacity.  This is the amount of energy needed to change the temperature of  a substance one degree Celsius.  This led us to specific heat and Specific heat practice. Specific heat is the heat capacity for one gram of a substance.  Once you know the specific heat of a substance, you can find out how much energy it will take to heat any amount of it by multiplying the specific heat, temperature change, and mass.  We did practice sheets on these to check for understanding, and my group got every question right.  We really had a good grip on this concept it really is simple to understand once you look into it enough.  We had a very short assessment on the last day of the week.  It was only on four standards and based on the weeks studies I think I was able to apply the concepts I knew and do the very best I could have on this assessment.