Week 8 Reflective Post

Starting off the week, we learned that most people had bombed the test that we had the previous week.  Because of that, we had a bit more work this week.  Our first lab of the week was the Nail Lab.  To start off the lab, we massed out a beaker and then the beaker with an added Copper (II) chloride dihydrate.  Our last mass calculation was the mass of our nails.  The last step was we placed the nails in the solution in the beaker, and put the beaker in the fume hood.  Day 2 was a bit more exciting in my opinion.  The instructions told us to take out the nails from the solution and scrape off the copper metal.  Seeing that our nails had entirely dissolved and all we had was copper, our final mass of the nails was 0 grams.  We decanted the solution so we could discover the mass of the copper (II) Chloride, and we also found the mass of the dry copper.  After these steps, we did come calculations to find the moles of copper and other pieces of information we could discover from our data.  This lab was a great demonstration of what can happen to solids in certain liquids and certainly paved the way for our next lab.

 

Most of the worksheets we did this week focused on the balancing of equations.  They contained both word problems and number problems.  The basic concept of the balancing of equations is fairly simple, you need both sides to have the same number of atoms with the right quantity of elements.  However, when you get to the more complicated equations, things get a lot harder.  For one, you're working with more numbers, but also to balance the equation you need to take multiple steps to ensure that you're getting the correct numbers.  At first, I really struggled with the harder problems.  I could never get the correct numbers for the atoms, as I didn't correctly have down a certain strategy that helped.  As I continued though, I started to understand the problems a lot better and I even started getting some correct answers.  I guess practice really does make perfect.
Our second and last lab of the week was extremely exciting.  It consisted of 10 stations, with each one displaying a different experiment.  The experiments went from inserting Zinc into 3 HCL to lighting a liquid compound on fire.  What these experiments were really meant to do, were to display the different types of reactions.  These reactions included double replacement reactions, combination reactions, decomposition reactions, and single replacement reactions.  Each reaction has certain characteristics that define how we know what kind of reaction each reaction is.  This lab was overall extremely fun, (we got to safely play with fire in some experiments), but it was also extremely beneficial as it gave us examples of some very important reaction concepts we need to know.
Our homework for the main part of the week was the 6 task chains.  Because we all performed poorly on the test, we are required to complete all 6 of the task chains by Monday night, with a score of at least an 85 for each.  I think this is extremely fair as we won't get any better by completing our homework with a score less than that.  These task chains cover everything from naming certain compound to understanding and applying ionic and covalent compounds.  Although the first few were pretty easy, the last three were definitely a bit trickier and it took some time before I was able to completely figure them out.  Overall though, they will be a great help to me and the class for when we retake our test.