Week 5 Blogpost

1. What's the big Question in Lab, and a description of what you did?

In the lab this week, the big question addressed was, "How can we support elementary students in learning about matter and its behavior? We began the lab by reviewing questions we have dealt with throughout the start of the semester, like "Why does the color on candies spread out in water?", "Why does a plunger stick to the table after you push it?", "Why does ice melt faster on metal than on wood?" As a group, we discussed our responses to each question, which helped us better understand why these phenomena were happening. As a whole class, we then discussed matter conservation and how matter cannot be created or destroyed in ordinary physical and chemical changes. What this means is that no matter what happens during the reactions, the total amount of matter stays the exact same, even though matter can change forms. For example, when wood burns, the log seems to “disappear,” but the matter is still there in the form of ash, smoke, carbon dioxide, and water vapor. After, we observed a particle model of how chemical reactions produce new substances, which showed me that when a chemical reaction takes place, the atoms rearrange, attracting different atoms, which then produce new substances. It is important to note that even though there is a new substance being formed, the total number of atoms never changes; therefore the mass the total mass before and after the reaction will stay the same. This brought us to our in-class chemical reaction experiment, where we observed what happens when we mix baking soda and vinegar. In the first part of this experiment, as a group, we began by putting a good amount of vinegar into the bottle. We put baking soda into the balloon and carefully put the balloon on the cap without letting the baking powder fall into the bottle. We weighed the bottle on the scale before and after the chemical reaction took place to see how the mass changed. We discovered that the bottle had gotten lighter in the first experiment, but this was due to the balloon filling up with pressure from the reaction, which actually helped lift the bottle a little, making the mass slightly less after the experiment took place. Then we did the second part of the experiment, where the balloon was removed, and we used the bottle's cap instead. We carefully placed a tube with the baking powder within the bottle and recorded the mass before and after the chemical reaction. This time, we found the mass to be exactly the same because no gases were able to escape the bottle into the balloon. As we know, matter conservation occurs during the process of a chemical reaction, which explains why the mass remains the same even though a change has occurred. 

2. No Lecture this week

3. No reading this week