Prezi!

So...a little while back we did a couple labs in Chemistry to learn more about hydrate formulas. The first lab involved some popcorn and the second involved some CuSo4. I did these labs with Morgan, Jocelyn, Destini, and Kelsey so we decided to collaborate on a Prezi together to talk about our labs! Here is the link to the Prezi:

Popcorn and Crystal Lab

Part 2: Empirical Formulas

In Chemistry we have been working on a couple different important concepts. I recently posted Part 1 on my blog which was a blog post about percent compositions which is a helpful skill on it's own. But! The next step is Empirical Formulas. And to be honest this is one of the most fun things I have done in Chemistry. Above is a flow chart that I made to explain how to solve an empirical formula from percent compositions. On the left side the chart describes the basic steps towards solving empirical formulas, and on the right side I work an example problem to further explain exactly how this process works! This will also be posted on my Pinterest Board which can be found here:

Sierra's Pinterest Board of Awesomeness!

:)

Shameless Plug...

So...about a week ago I came up with the idea to start a board on pinterest to include the things I have been learning in Chemistry. Right now we have been focusing a lot on the mole and how it relates with percent composition and formulas. I at first thought that I would only include that information on my Pinterest Board, but I have enjoyed it so much that I think I will continue to add to the board no matter what we are studying in Chemistry. I plan to pin some of my blog posts here...but also other things I make and find that relates to what we are studying. So here you go:

http://pinterest.com/sierra135/the-mole-chemistry/

This is the link to my Mole/Chemistry in general board on Pinterest! I hope to keep this board up for the rest of the year, and who knows? Maybe beyond ;) and add stuff that is helpful in gaining a greater understanding of what we are studying!

Enjoy!

Part 1: Percent Composition

Our Friend! The Periodic Table!

Over the past few weeks we have been focusing on some pretty big ideas. Above is a scanned image of the notes I took over three big concepts that we have been working on:
1. Percent Composition
2. Empirical Formulas
3. Molecular Formulas

First we worked on Percent Composition which is probably my favorite thing we have been doing. It takes some help from our friend the periodic table. Above on the left side of the scanned image of my notes you can see the formulas C5H8NO4. And you can see the rows of numbers below each letter. What does this mean? Well to find percent composition, we first need to look at the periodic table. C is the symbol for Carbon and when we look we see that the atomic mass is 12.011. In our formula there 5 Carbons. Sooooo...12x5 is 60. Then we do the same thing for the other symbols...Hydrogen has an atomic mass of 1.0079 (Hint: I round the numbers when I add them) so, 1x8 is 8. Then we move on to Nitrogen and Oxygen. At the end of it all, as you can see above, after we add together all our numbers we end up with 146. This is an important number because we need it to find the percent compositions of each Element in this formula. In the scanned image above I found the percent composition of Carbon in this formula. How did I do this? I divided the total mass of Carbon in this formula by the total mass of all of the elements. Which looks something like this: 60/146. Which is... .4109 and so on. Moving the decimal over we find that our percent composition of Carbon in this formula is 41.1%! This can be applied to any of the elements in the formula. For example the percent composition of Oxygen in the formula is 64/146 which comes out to .4383...43.8%!

Percent Composition is probably the most simple thing (to me anyway) that we have been working on. And I have really enjoyed working with problems to find Percent Composition!

Types of Reactions Lab

This is the Prezi I created to talk about the process involved in the types of reactions lab and the information I gathered while doing the lab!

Types of Chemical Bonds

We have been talking a lot about Chemical Bonds in Chemistry...


Ionic Bond:
First we started by identifying ionic compounds, which wasn't too hard. You just have to look for a compound that includes a metal and a nonmetal. So identifying them aren't very hard. This sheet to the left is a worksheet we did to identify compounds that are either ionic, covalent, or both. After we learned about ionic bonds we moved on to covalent bonds.





Covalent Compounds:
Below on the far left is a worksheet we did in Chemistry to work on naming covalent compounds. You can see the list I wrote in. It shows all of the prefixes involved in naming the compounds. For example on number 1 you can see that it says CO2. C is the element Carbon and O is the element Oxygen. When they are together they are Carbon Dioxide because there is a 2 and the prefix for 2 is Di! Another thing that helped in naming these compounds was the chart that Mr. Ludwig gave us. It is below on the right side and was really helpful in figuring out how to go about naming a compound if I got stuck on a really hard one.

Chemical Names and Formulas

One of the major things we have been working on this quarter is writing out the formulas for compounds and being able to identify the name of compound by it's formula. I had a lot of trouble with this at first, but once i got the hang of it it became really easy and actually pretty fun!

This first sheet is an activity that we did to help us with naming compounds and writing out formulas. This helped me a lot. There is a lot of confusion when it comes to some of them at first but it really helped to use a  "cheat sheet" Mr. Ludwig gave us that basically listed some different elements and their number of protons or electrons and how they can combine to make a compound! 

Below is a test I took in Chemistry that shows my ability in naming and identifying names and formulas of compounds. I only missed one question on this test!