I was out today, but students were given a sheet of problems to practice working with the Specific Heat Equation.  The lab handout for next week (Tuesday) was distributed and students had the opportunity to watch the Calorimetry Activity - Prelab Briefing on EDpuzzle; this must be viewed prior to Tuesday or student's will not be permitted to participate in class and will need to makeup the lab within 2 days.

Today we wrapped up our look at the class responses to the Changes & Properties surveys.  An interesting takeaway was how changes that involved a disappearance of material (dissolving, evaporating) were frequently thought of as chemical changes.  After we tackled this misconception, students followed up last night's EDpuzzle video on energy unit conversions with a sheet of practice problems.

Following today's Element Quiz #5 (don't forget, the Test on the entire Element Symbols packet is next Wednesday), please apply your knowledge and understanding of chemical and physical changes to the examples below.

Next, please apply your knowledge and understanding of chemical and physical (both intensive and extensive) properties to the examples below.  We will have a class discussion about the answers.

Element Quiz #4 & then opportunity to ask questions that might appear on tomorrow's unit test on Math Skills for Chemistry.

Today we continued the station rotation activity, and discussed conversions involving squared and cubed units (see EDpuzzle for related video).

The PhET Density Simulation activities were also returned and some key points were shared.

• Volume of the objects can only be measured if the object is completely submergedin the water.  If you kept getting density values of 1.00kg/L for multiple objects (especially the ones that floated), you probably did not have the object submerged.
  
• Substances with densities >1.00kg/L will sink in water...all the way to the bottom.  There is no way to tell just by observation which object is the densest without knowing the mass of the object compared to others that also sank.  Objects that float, however, can be ranked by density, based on the proportion of the object that is submerged.  The higher the proportion of the object that is submerged, the closer that object's density is to 1 kg/L; the smaller the proportion of the object that is submerged, the smaller that object's density is (less than 1kg/L).
  

A sheet of practice density problems (requires some thoughtful analysis and application of the concepts of floating/sinking and material density) was also distributed.  You can access the handout here (will require your Office365 login info).  These would make for some nifty open-ended test questions...

Element Quiz #4 (Metalloids & Nonmetals) is tomorrow, as well as time to ask questions in preparation for Friday's Unit Exam.

Today we did a Station Rotation Activity where students practiced unit conversions with the factor-label method and reviewed their metric unit prefixes by constructing a large metric unit number line as a group.

Today we followed up our POGIL discussion of Experimental Design by asking the question, "now what do we do with the data we collected?"  In the "Organizing Data" POGIL activity, students are looking at ways to organize raw lab data in a way that begins to make patterns or trends evident, and then looks at different ways to visually depict the data (using bar graphs & scatter plots) so that the pattern is more visually evident.

Homework for tomorrow (except Pd. 2) - Watch the 2 assigned videos posted to EDpuzzle

I was out today, so students watched 2 segments from the PBS NOVA episode, "Hunting the Elements".  The segments focused on the elements gold and copper, two transition metal elements, which is the section that is the focus of next week's element quiz.

Following the Chapter 1 Assessment, please watch the introductory video on Process Skills, then complete the Google Form below.

Today students assessed on their knowledge of laboratory equipment.  They also received their textbooks and signed up for an EDpuzzle account; EDpuzzle is the platform through which the flipped video assignments will be posted.