Vitamin C Lab

This lab was a blast. It was very cool to be dealing with household liquids rather than a bunch of chemicals that I don't know. We had to take a variety of liquids like:apple juice, V8 juice, pear juice, and grapefruit juice along with starch and determine which one had the highest and lowest vitamin C concentration. It was one of the more enjoyable labs, hopefully we will have more like this one.

Locating Electrons and Electron Configuration

I am loving this unit so far. The less math and calculations, the better. In this lesson we learned about how to locate electrons and I understood it with ease. First you would locate the principle energy level, which is basically which row it was in going across the periodic table. Then you would find the sub-level it is in. There are four sub-levels: S,P,D, and F. After that, you simply counted the number of elements into that sub-level to locate your beloved electron. All of these components were used to make an electron configuration. For example: Oxygen has an electron configuration of 1s^2 2s^2 2p^4. The lesson was enjoyable and easy, what a blessing.


Wonderful Video Regarding Electron Configuration

Additional Video That Also Reviews The Specific Rules And Principles That Need To Be Followed

Wavelengths and Energy Calculations

This lesson had something very rare. It contained some information that I had prior knowledge about. I cannot remember a lesson where I could recall knowing something that I had previously learned before. This information was the basics of wavelengths. The good ole spectrum that listed the wavelengths in order of smallest wavelength / most energy to the least energy / longest wavelengths. It was quite refreshing to see something familiar, but with that came many new things. Calculating energy and wavelength with frequency didn't seem to difficult, but all of the equations got confusing and could sometimes be hard. In conclusion, this is still my favorite unit, and it is still fairly simple.


Calculation Help

Very Useful Source For Entire Lesson And The Electromagnetic Spectrum

http://9-4fordham.wikispaces.com/file/view/em_spectrum.jpg/244287321/em_spectrum.jpg

Spec. 20 Lab

Yawn. Oh sorry, I just got done with the Spec. 20 Lab. That lab was almost as exciting as my nap. I had a dream that I was sitting in class watching a knob get twisted left and right, left and right for what seemed like a couple years. This lab was the exactly the opposite of the Flame Lab. Hey, I guess they all can't be as exciting as color changing flames. We collected a bunch of pointless information regarding transmittance percentage and absorbance after redundantly recording way too many numbers. I pray that we leave labs like this in the past, and do something more exciting from here on out.

Info About Transmittance And Absorbance

Periodic Trends

The final lesson before our big unit test concerned me a bit at first. Throughout the lecture I thought that this lesson was very hard. After reviewing it over, I realized there was only one huge key concept that you needed to remember. That was this magical little picture / graph showing the periodic trends and which way they increased based on the periodic table. It had them all: ionization energy, electron affinity, metallic characteristics, and the atomic radius. All of these trends were very important, but you really only needed to know which elements would be more or less compared to each other based on the direction of those trends.

Fantastic Source To Better Understand Periodic Trends 

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/41/PERIODIC_TRENDS.jpg

Flame Lab

http://ih0.redbubble.net/image.25458624.7071/flat,550x550,075,f.jpg

This was by far the coolest lab we've done yet. Seeing the fire change colors was extraordinary. I've never seen anything like it. It was like magic inches from my face. I hope to do more labs with fire in the future.

New Unit, New Me

I am putting the last two units behind me. Let's just say that the last two units resulted in the words grades I've ever seen in my life. The test scores I was getting were unheard of. I am really going to work hard for every thing in this class. I am going to put way more effort into making sure I thoroughly understand every concept of every lecture. I will study harder and more than I ever have before. I have to get my abysmal grade up, it's not a option.

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