Apologia Physical Science, Module 1, The Basics

•What we did 2010
•Videos for this module

This is my second time around with Physical Science!  And I think I like it the best.  (But I also said that about Biology, and some modules of General Science, haha.)

Exp. 1.1, Atoms and Molecules
A 9V battery and copper wire in water w/ baking soda... bubbles coming from the ends of the wires...
Copper atoms were able to link together with oxygen atoms, hydrogen atoms, and carbon atoms to form molecules of copper hydroxycarbonate on the end of one of the wires.

Basically atoms and elements are the same thing. 

But an atom is just the smallest amount of an element.

Read this ice cream analogy.

We talked about how atoms link together to make molecules, and how formulas for molecules were written to indicate how many of each atom actually made up a particular molecule.  H2O means that there are 2 atoms of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen in a molecule of water.
I had written out several chemical formulas and assigned colors to each element (atom).  The kids used Legos to "build" the molecules.  They used a variety of ways to put them together, haha, but I only cared that they knew how to read a chemical formula, and that individual atoms were what made up a molecule.

From left to right:  JohnDavid (my son), Caleb (my nephew), Bethany (my daughter
and JohnDavid's twin), Sarah (who is new this year!), and Courtney her sister.  =)

As you can see by the grins in these pics, my son keeps us laughing.  =)

We also did Exp. 1.3, Concentration, with the Tums and vinegar, and we did some conversions between units using the factor/label method.  It was pretty simple once they got the hang of it.  And they could watch the videos at home for review (in section 4).


sMiLeS,