Susan's Homeschool Blog

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Today we will be identifying mixtures and compounds by looking at different substances and trying to figure out if the ingredients are chemically bonded together or not. My younger two children are using Christian Kids Explore Chemistry by Bright Ideas Press, and this is one of the fun experiments in the book.

You will want to take out 6 bowls and make 6 labels. 3 by 5 cards folded length-wise are perfect for the labels. You can write with a black marker the following mixtures and compounds:

• mustard mixture
• sand/salt mixture
• sugar compound
• salt compound
• water compound
• water/oil mixture

Go ahead and examine each of the mixtures and compounds to figure out why they are mixtures and compounds. The hardest one for my kids was the mustard. They thought it was a compound because it looked like one substance, but mustard is made up of different powdered ingredients (solids) and water. There is no chemical bond between the ingredients, which is why it is a mixture.

Sand and salt don’t chemically bond together when placed in a bowl, so that one was obviously a mixture. The sugar, salt, and water were obviously compounds because the elements combined chemically to produce a new substance.

Last but not least was the water/oil mixture. We poured water and oil into a bowl, and they definitely didn’t combine into a new substance. In fact, they remained as separate as ever! We tinted the water blue to show how the water (blue) and the oil (light yellow) are not even wanting to mingle together. You can see in the video that something unexpected happened with this last mixture, which resembled fireworks!

This post contains affiliate links. I was compensated for my work in writing this post.

Today I will show you how to make your own element cards for the Periodic Table of Elements. We are using Christian Kids Explore Chemistry by Bright Ideas Press to study elementary-level chemistry, and one of the activities throughout the book is to make element cards. You do not have to make element cards for every single element on the periodic table, but if you do, you can make this giant Periodic Table Puzzle!

You will need some blank 3 by 5 cards. We decided to write the chemical symbols with bubble letters that we color-coded according to whether the elements were metals or non-metals. You can further classify the metals if you want.

These are the pieces of information we wrote on each card:

• chemical symbol
• name of the element
• atomic number
• atomic weight

On the back of each card you can write any interesting information about each element. You can find this information in books or on the internet.

To facilitate putting together the Periodic Table Puzzle, you will want to look at the atomic numbers. The periodic table is set up in order according to the atomic numbers. Watch the video at the bottom of this blog post to see how the periodic table is arranged.

You can use these cards in many ways:

• Make a Periodic Table Puzzle
• Use the cards to quiz each other on elements and their symbols
• Based on the color, learn which elements are non-metals.
• Use it as an encyclopedia of each element on the back of the cards.
• Learn the atomic numbers of common elements.

Take a look at how we arranged these element cards: