Week 17 blog reflection

This was the last week of the semester! We started off the week learning new concepts and starting on new materials, finally exploring out of the realm of particles and into the world of atoms and molecules. We also took a day to review for midterms, the midterm for chemistry is unique because it will be taken online. We also cannot make a note card, but a note tee shirt. I'm a little worried because I think I can study hard and get a good grade, but the test is material we know plus things we haven't learned and I just don't want that to throw me off. Overall though I think it will be okay, and I'm excited to take my first online midterm! It should be very interesting to take it in that environment in front of a computer screen, And maybe even less stressful!

Week 16 Reflection

Back to school after an amazing holiday break, and back to learn more new and exciting things in Chem in 2013.  We started of the new year with a new unit on solutions, compounds, and mixtures, concepts none of us could really recall learning at any other time.  All through the week we developed our understanding of these concepts using simulations with different things like magnets of different colors.   We tried for the first time, separating matter.  We thought of distillation for things like water sand and salt, but didn't know how to get seeds out of the mix.  We then found that they floated on water! We used this information to let the seeds float to the top of water and took them out with a spoon.  The sand was taken out of the water using a coffee filter; now all we had left was salt and water.  What we did now was heat the water.  Since it has a lower boiling point than salt, it evaporated away and left us with just salt, now the substances were all separated.  These labs helped us see the different ways to use he properties of water to help us understand other things, helping us in our knowledge of chemicals and mixtures, compounds, and solutions.

Week 15 Reflection

The week before break is always stressful, especially for those choir kids like me who had to miss a lot of Chem class to Christmas carol. As fun as that was, I wish I was there for more debriefing and expansion on week 14's soap lab. But all in all the week was all leading up to the ICS test.  The first time Mr. Abud mentioned it he told us we could look it up if we wanted to know any more, well I did, and found out it didn't exist.  I finally came in Friday and found out what ICS really stood for; Ice Cream Social.  This lab was a lab to explore the phase changes and how temperature effects phase, using ice cream.  We made our own ice cream using a variety of ingredients and found that although the  temperature got too cold, the sweet treat didn't freeze.  It did taste delicious though.  This lab made us realize that some rules are not set in stone and the fluctuation is an important part of how temperature and phase change work. There are exceptions and it may not make sense to us all the time but it can happen.

Week 14 Reflection

This week was the start of a very informative and fun soap lab.  We started with doing research and looking at the detailed instructions on google drive.  We split into groups to discuss the materials, process, lab write up, and who was going to do what.  The day after we solidified our ideas (pun not intended) And got to work on preparations for the experiment like making an evernote document and writing down our plan.  We got the materials and got to work.  Thankfully we were able to use some of Mr. Abud's soap base and magnolia scent for our soap.  A girl in our group had fun chocolate molds we used for our soap.  These were in shapes of things like candy canes and stockings, but also eggs and burgers, which is how we got to our company name "Delicious Christmas."  The soap turned out great and made awesome christmas gifts for family and friends!  It also helped us understand the different things heat could do, I also thought it was a good activity to focus on teamwork because we had to work together and very quickly before the soap hardened so communication really was key.  Overall this experiment was very beneficial to all aspects of our class and even gave me a better understanding of Evernote in making our presentation.

Week 13 Reflection

Week 13 was all about our own understanding of what we were doing in class.  Monday we started with a self evaluation of the newly ended unit 3.  The next day we were to make our own definitions to new terms.  These were terms such as Heat of Vaporization and Heat of Fusion.  I believe coming up with the definition is much more beneficial than just looking it up.  It really gets you thinking about the concepts and bouncing ideas off classmates.  We continued the week with more new concepts like energy bar charts. These were a surprisingly simple way to represent what we knew, but it took a lot of work throughout the week to figure out a good way to use them and represent all of our ideas.  We did a lab to use all of our new skills, we did a lab finding the specific heat of copper.  We heated a copper pipe and used the color to indicate the specific heat.  This lab really helps us to understand how to use our skills to get through a process like this.  We later debriefed this lab to help us fully get the ideas expressed like the new use of energy charts and heat of fusion.