Mad Science!

Over the last semester, one of the most exciting things was science. We learned many cool things and got to try out stuff that you can't always do! To be honest, at first, I wasn't very happy about having mad scientists. I thought that we would be taught all sorts of mumbo-jumbo that we couldn't even vremember, but boy, was I wrong!

Vocabulary is one of the top things that I learned in this unit . I never knew there were so object or substances that had special names. Like salt. Salt is sodium chloride or NaCl, and the liquid that dissolves something is called a solvent. I now can finally impress my father who is a chemistry and science freak! My very favorite word is precipitate. To me, it sounds interesting and is fun to say. Since I now know the vocabulary real live scientists use, whenever I ask for a glass of water, I will say "May I have some H2O?"

There were 3 investigations that we did, the first one was about separating different kinds of mixtures, another was about dissolving, and the last one was fizz quiz! I found fizz quiz to be the most exciting one of all. I mean, it was fun to see what would turn up in separating mixture, and shaking (to dissolve things) of course, but I loved seeing chemical reactions. The fizzing was my favorite part. Here is an example: there is a cup of water. We pour calcium chloride, baking soda and citric acid into the cup of water and see what happens. However, if there is a chemical reaction, a product must always result. This is because atoms which make up molecule all rearrange themselves into new substances (something cool that I never knew!).
Chalk and vinegar together create a chemical reaction because of all the fizzing. To see what was made after we put a few ingredients together, we poured vinegar on the soft white powder that was formed to check if it was chalk or not. Once it worked, but the other time, we learned about a new substance. That is just a small taste of what I learned in my favorite unit.

Though this was fun, we also had to think. Real scientists don't always get what they need. Things sometimes didn't make sense and we weren't always sure what was going to work. Sometimes we needed to make the decisions ourself. That is where my thinking was pushed. I had to see what I thought I really needed to do find out the answer, and what I wanted to do. Sometimes, it was just hard. I didn't know what worked and what didn't. In the end though, I had done well.

Science was extremely fun, but now it is over. I learned a bunch of stuff and after the first few days, was happy to see Mad scientists on the schedule. It is a load of fun to try new experiments and results. You may not know it, but science is almost everywhere. After finishing this unit, I have one thing to say; science rocks!