Middle School Science Lessons

For today’s class we did two different labs. The first one I found while digging for materials for the chemistry class I’l be teaching this fall.  This website, Middle School Science, has a great list of resources for middle school chemistry, including this activity for ‘bottles of stuff.’ I liked this activity because the kids get to bring in a bottle of stuff, they have to guess which ones are more massive and then actually estimate the mass of each bottle.  Since few Americans are familiar with grams, its a bit of challenge to guess the mass of a bottle of legos in grams so I gave them a big bottle that had a mass of 500 grams, a 50 gram brass mass and 5 gram cubes (each cube is a gram).  This helped them at least get the right order of magnitude.  Once everybody had their estimates the…