Lab Week 15: The Last Week!
Today in lab, we used baking soda and vinegar to demonstrate that matter is conserved no matter how we mix substances or how they react. We used this experiment to develop a lesson plan of how we could teach this in a fifth grade classroom. The question we decided to pose to initiate investigation is: Does the weight of the vinegar and baking soda mixture stay the same before and after you mix them? We will elicit initial student ideas by asking students what they think will happen when we mix the two substances. Even if they have not done the experiment before, the investigation will be deepened because they will have to rethink their responses and why they think that. We will ask students if they think the mixture will weigh the same as the two separate substances, and if it changes to a solid or a gas would it still have the same weight? The original weights of each substance on the zeroed out scale are: vinegar: 41.5g baking soda: 10.4g plastic baggie: 5.1g total weight before...