Elements Song

hat-tip Ana

Very cool periodic table showing electron shells

Two teens in our local homeschool group are teaching a science class for kids aged 9-12. Last time, they handed out this very cool periodic table:


Instead of element symbols, electron configuration diagrams occupy the center of each element box. Running your finger (or eye) along row 5, for example, you can see why the palladium atom is smaller than the rhodium even though it has one more electron. I love it!

You can also find larger electron configuration diagrams for each element; they are indexed here.

This periodic table would make a great accompaniment to Mary Daly's Chemsitry 001 or other chemistry course. Also helpful when studying the physics of elementary particles.

Click on the Chemistry label below for a couple of other intriguing periodic tables.

How a Candle Works

This is a fascinating little exposition on the candle. It's really amazing - be sure to watch closely at the end, especially, when he relights the candle by the lighting up the "smoke" from the extinguished wick!

The Visual Elements Periodic Table

A few posts back, Ana linked to a really cool Periodic Table that had videotaped experimentations for each element. Here's another cool online Periodic Table. Check it out with the kids!

Hat Tip: At Home Science

Videos of the Periodic Table!

Featured by the University of Nottingham... check it out here!

"Don't Try This at Home"

A fascinating though rather sad article on the effects of government regulations regarding safety, drug labs and terrorism on the study of chemistry at home...

The lure of do-it-yourself chemistry has always been the most potent recruiting tool science has to offer. Many kids attracted by the promise of filling the garage with clouds of ammonium sulfide – the proverbial stink bomb – went on to brilliant careers in mathematics, biology, programming, and medicine.

Intel cofounder Gordon Moore set off his first boom in Silicon Valley two decades before pioneering the design of the integrated circuit. One afternoon in 1940, near the spot where Interstate 280 intersects Sand Hill Road today, the future father of the semiconductor industry knelt beside a cache of homemade dynamite and lit the fuse. He was 11 years old.

Moore’s pyrotechnic adventures grew out of his experiments with a neighbor’s chemistry set. He turned a shed beside the family house into a lab, stocking it with chemicals mail-ordered from San Francisco and filling an old dresser with beakers and funnels. Now retired, the 77-year-old Moore looks back on his days and nights in the shed as a time when he learned to think and work like a scientist. “The things I made, like nitroglycerin, took a fair amount of lab technique,” he recalls. “I specialized in explosives because they were fun, and I liked doing things that got results in a hurry.”

Many of Moore’s illustrious peers also first got interested in science by performing experiments at home. After reading a book called The Boy Scientist at age 10, Vint Cerf – who became one of the architects of the Internet – spent months blowing up thermite volcanoes and launching backyard rockets. Growing up in Colorado, David Packard – the late cofounder of Hewlett-Packard – concocted new recipes for gunpowder. The neurologist Oliver Sacks writes about his adolescent love affair with “stinks and bangs” in Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood. “There’s no question that stinks and bangs and crystals and colors are what drew kids – particularly boys – to science,” says Roald Hoffmann of Cornell University, who won the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1981. “Now the potential for stinks and bangs has been legislated out.”

Popular Science columnist Theodore Gray, who is one of United Nuclear’s regular customers, uses potassium perchlorate to demonstrate the abundance of energy stored in sugar and fat. He chops up Snickers bars, sprinkles in the snowy crystals, and ignites the mixture, which bursts into a tower of flame – the same rapid exothermic reaction that propels model rockets skyward. “Why is it that I can walk into Wal-Mart and buy boxes of bullets and black powder, but I can’t buy potassium perchlorate to do science because it can also be used to make explosives?” he asks. “How many people are injured each year doing extreme sports or playing high school football? But mention mixing up chemicals in your home lab, and people have a much lower index of acceptable risk.”

Read the entire article here

Hat-tip HE&OS

The Periodic Table Song

Choose broadband or dial-up at the bottom of the screen to view this. My kids loved it!

hat-tip to my husband

UPDATE:

Dr. Thursday has sent me his transcription of the Elements song - in symbols!

The Element Song
by Tom Lehrer

There's Sb, As, Al, Se,
And H & O & N & Re,
And Ni, Nd, Np, Ge,
And Fe, Am, Ru, U,
Eu, Zr, Lu, V,
And La & Os & At & Ra
And Au, Pa, In, Ga,
And I & Th & Tm & T.

There's Y, Yb, Ac, Rb,
And B, Gd, Nb, Ir,
And Sr & Si & Ag & Sm,
And Bi, Br, Li, Be, & Ba.

There's Ho & He & Hf & Er,
And P & Fr & F & Tb,
And Mn & Hg, Mo, Mg,
Dy & Sc & Ce & Cs,
And Pb, Pr, Pt, Pu,
Pd, Pm, K, Po,
And Ta, Tc, Ti, Te,
And Cd & Ca & Cr & Cm.

There's S, Cf and Fm, Bk,
And also Mv, Es, No,
Ar, Kr, Ne, Rn, Xe, Zn, & Rh,
And Cl, C, Co, Cu, W, Sn, & Na.

These are the only ones of which the news has come to Hah-vard,
And there many may others but they haven't been discovered.

(Dum, diddily dum-dum, boom boom!)

Note: this list only goes up to 102 (No); some others have indeed been
discovered since then. They are listed at the end of the animation linked above.

Review of Chemistry 001

A review of Mary Daly's new book, Chemistry 001, has been posted to the love2learn blog, here.

Interactive Periodic Table

This is a really cool website: Interactive Periodic Table of the Elements.

Use the hyperlinks in the left column to manipulate the Table. You can change it to show the full names of elements instead of their symbols, to show their date of discovery, melting point, etc. You have it display only halogens, rare earth elements, noble gases, etc.

The best part, I think, is that you can click on any element within the Table and learn ALL about it.

Great little learning tool.