It seems I have lost steam here--I had such great plans to post every day.
Well, lets catch up on the class lately. We are studying the periodic table now--looking first at what is found in every box on every table--atomic number (number of protons), atomic mass (the average of all the mass numbers of all the isotopes found in nature), the symbol, and the name of the element. Students have this down pretty well. We have been drawing the Bohr models of the isotopes and writing out the nuclear notation for any given isotope. Pretty impressive stuff, I'd say. We took a quiz on the 25 elements I had given them two weeks ago when we started the unit. The average was about a B, but many students got A's and even a few A+'s.
Now we will talk about the groups and families on the chart, and about periodicity, how the properties of the elements repeat themselves periodically throughout the chart. We are also coloring a chart in lab--two weeks on this and then we will have a test on it worth 50 points. Time is moving fast, though. Only two and a half weeks until Thanksgiving break.
SJ.
