Middle School Inquiry Lab on Synthetic Materials
In this lab students will create a synthetic material made from two chemicals derived from natural resources.
Each inquiry lab will contain an essential question that will drive the lesson and make students think. For this lesson, the essential question is:
- How can synthetic materials be made from natural products, and how can synthetic materials impact society?
BACKGROUND INFORMATION AND MATERIALS LIST:
Students will begin the lab by reading the essential question and background information. This can be done individually, as lab groups, or as a whole class. If you consider lab groups, you also might include some type of whole class formative checks before digging into the lab.
Materials List:
- 1 100 mL beaker
- 1 500 mL beaker
- pipette
- stirring Rod
- 25 mL calcium chloride
- 2 mL sodium alginate
- distilled water
- 25 mL graduated cylinder
- food coloring
PROCEDURE:
In this lab, students work to create a synthetic product from natural resources. Dissolving two natural based products in water and adding food coloring, students will witness a chemical reaction that turns natural products into a synthetic material. Students will be asked to create different shapes with their mixture.
CHECK FOR UNDERSTANDING:
At this point in the lab, students will be checked for understanding by answering questions about their findings. Here are a few that come with the lab:
- How did the sodium alginate change when it was dissolved with the water?
- At this point, is the sodium alginate still a natural product, or is it a synthetic product? Why?
- What happened to the sodium alginate when it was introduced to the calcium chloride?
- What happened to the natural resources of sodium alginate and the calcium chloride that you started with?
- Why might we want to use this synthetic product instead of a natural product?
CONCLUSION
Students will go back to the essential question and write a CER (Claim, Evidence, Reasoning) to conclude the lab. Once completed, students will reflect back on their learning by answering the following questions:
- What are some other potential uses for the product you created in this lab?
- Sodium alginate is harvested from a marine environment. How do you think this might impact living organisms that live there?
MODIFIED AND INDEPENDENT INQUIRY VERSIONS
All of the Kesler Science inquiry labs come with three different modification levels. Each lab is differentiated using the icons below.
STANDARDS ALIGNMENT
NGSS: MS-PS1-3 – Gather and make sense of information to describe that synthetic materials come from natural resources and impact society.
