Middle School Science Lessons

Updated 11/11/18

Objective: How can we use mass, volume, and density to determine what a substance is made of?

Materials:

• Flinn Scientfic Block set (link) & Resources/Handout (pdf)
• Metal blocks set – iron, aluminum, brass, steel, zinc, & copper
• Ruler
• Calculator
• Triple Beam Balance
• Worksheet to collect data (pdf)

I modified this lab to use metal cubes and rectangular prisms and had the students identify the metals and some of the blocks from Flinn.

• Google Sheets – this will do all the calculations for you once you enter the measurements
• Google Doc – this is the handout I used with this lesson

For this activity, I used the set of density blocks from Flinn Scientific. Each group of students had 6 blocks made of the same material. Their challenge was to identify the material using their measurement skills to calculate the mass, volume, and density of each block. This activity also reinforced the concept that the density of an object is constant.