Week 10 Reflection

I never ever understood that there was anything wrong with the word heat. This week proved me wrong. I now understand that heat is non existent, it is really just the presence of energy. I also now know that there is a lot that goes into the definition of temperature. It's also centered around the amount of energy. I also have been proven wrong in my belief that there are all these different "flavors" of energy. There's only one flavor, energy. It does not change forms, but is only stored differently. Energy and the idea of heat also went into our lab on Thursday. We used food coloring so we could see the differences in the stages of melting our water. We were also working on our project throughout the week which was making a thermos. This came with some guidelines which helped them all to be regulated. Ours took a while to make but turned out pretty well I think! (Picture below) this week was full of proving myths wrong and showing us how to rightly change out ideas about these topics.

Week 9 reflection

Week nine already! Time is flying in honors chem! This week was only a three day week for me but it was a short week full of new chemistry! We started the week by turning in and testing our home made barometers (pictured in action below). It was so cool to see how we could so simply make something that actually could be used to measure the weather! We later practice PTVn problems and I actually enjoyed them to some degree, it was cool to put our thoughts to numbers. Our assessment was Friday and I think I nailed some of the problems, but others, not so much. I hope I did okay but after studying up some more this weekend I think I'm ready to reassess if necessary! This week was very short but very substantial in Honors Chemistry!

Week 8 Reflection

At the start of this week, we learned how pressure relates to aspects like temperature, volume, and number of particles. They all became interconnected as we came to realize, and it helped us with the rest of the weeks activities. Wednesday was Halloween, we did an experiment with glow sticks. We tested to see how temperature effected the glow of the glow sticks and I learned a lot on how to preserve my glow stick! And a lot about how the particles in a glow stick move based in different temperatures. At the end of the week we started to learn about barometric pressure and weather and even discussed hurricane sandy. This weekends homework was to make a barometer with a partner and ours is pictures below, it really taught me a lot about how they work, and how pressure effected them!

week 7 reflection

This week we went further in our explorations of unit two. We learned more about pressure and learned how it relates to different forms of matter. We also learned about how thermometers work and it was interesting to figure it out! We also related pressure to force and area using experiments with surface area on a bed of nails. This experiment actually scared me because whenever I put the weight on Kelly's hand I was afraid I was going to hurt her, but this only helped give me a better understanding of the relation between force,pressure, and area. We also learned what temperature really means and how it relates to all of the weeks other lessons. Friday we did the standards as a class assessment and I think doing so will really help me on the assessment coming up this week! On a less academic note I learned Lexi has the best writing pen I have ever seen so unfortunately I must stop my blog post to go buy it, but before I go, the picture below is our results from a very informative lab we did. In this lab, we learned what would happen to pressure as temperature increased and the results we found were very interesting.

Week 6 Reflection

This week we officially ended our first unit in honors chemistry. It felt good to know how we could apply what we learned in that unit to this new one! We drew pictures representing all of the standards that we learned in unit one and it was interesting to see how each group depicted the ideas. After that, to start off the new unit, we watched a cartoon video explaining molecules, which I now know is Latin for little lumps, and how they move. I really enjoyed this video and it taught me in a way that I will remember the concept! I honesty hope we watch more like it. We also watched one explaining how a solid becomes a liquid due to heat and that helped me apply the idea to gases and order them from coolest to hottest material. We are still drawing great particle diagrams to represent what is happening at the lowest possible level. I was absent on Friday but I understand that we worked more with the new units concepts. Overall, this week has been an introduction to new ideas and I think I'm going to like unit two.

Week 5 Reflection

Monday and Tuesday started the planning for a long awaited lab involving water, two students, and a trash can. We all came to consensus fairly quickly about how to do the experiment, agreeing on the kiddy pool, trash can, filling water to the top, and water collection method. And then we came down to choosing who would be the subject of the experiment. Consensus was more difficult on this until a brave Shannon and Thomas agreed to be dunked. We finally were ready for the density of a student lab. Wednesday we finally did the lab. It had a few glitches, like water falling into the pool every time it was moved, but we were able to apply the conservation of mass and realize that nothing is actually leaving the system. After that it went off almost without a hitch. We had a group who put together a great PowerPoint that night and on Friday we all helped complete it. This week overall was a really good skill building week for all of us. We put together our own experiment as a class, completed it, found results, and made conclusions. I was really happy with the overall experiment and results. I've really learned a lot about how to try to perfect the process and result collection when creating an experiment.

Week 4 reflection

This week we learned how to use and understand ActiveGrade, this is useful to figure out how our grade is doing without a letter grade. We then did a lab to find the volume of candy. this taught us a new skill because you can't just use a formula to find the volume of an irregular object so water displacement is a good skill to learn. We had a sub on the third day of the week so we all helped each other to understand the lab and found the thickness of a paper sized sheet of aluminum foil. This helped us to figure out how to take control of the formulas we've learned to help in different situations. When we did the lab to find the density of a gas, my group had to complete it twice because our stopper fell into our flask instead of trapping the gas, this helped us realize we should always test our lab equipment before performing the experiment. The actual lab taught us another way to find the volume of an irregular object. The debriefing of these labs was helpful and I was able to find out the reasons for doing the labs and get the fullest learning out of them.