Solutions,+Acids,+and+Bases

A lab that uses a wide variety of acid/base indicators- Cabbage juice, beets, and asian sweet potato skin (the red ones) boiled in hot water make good pH indicators.

Students can bring substances from home to learn which are acids and bases Testing solutions can also provide a review of ionic and covalent compounds Two labs that check out what will and won't form a solution- [|sports drink virtual lab] [|city water system virtual lab]

There are many hands on labs to explore factors affecting solubility.

Use dice, sugar cubes, or Unifix cubes (teacher store) to build cubes of different sizes (1x1x1, 2x2x2, 3x3x3, etc.) to compare surface area/volume ratios Rita has students wrapping boxes of different sizes to gain an understanding of surface area (newspaper is cheap) For gas solutions in liquid- Compare opening a warm soda vs cold soda. put soda in a syringe or bell jar with vacuum and decrease the pressure. KNO3 has dramatic change of solubility with temperature and makes a good graphing lab.

For molarilty and concentration problems-

Tealia- gives a sheet of solved problems for homework- students need to find the one that is wrong Rita- reading on ppm using a water district annual water quality report- what do those numbers mean?