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.