Bond Polarity

I understood this on the Friday we learned it. However the following week after my brain seemed to just dump it out and made me forget all of it! I had to relearn it again. I think the second time made more sense however. It kinda confused me when the bond itself can be polar because of imbalance of charge and when one atom is more electronegative than the other and then the molecule itself is nonpolar. The trick is to look at the shape since shape determines function. If the bonds are all pointing away from each other they basically cancel out since no one atom sucks the electrons (partial negative - most electronegative atom). Also you have to remember if the shape is polar or nonpolar in general. It got confusing to me no doubt but I finally got it later on. It's a lot to handle that's for sure! But once you have that click it'll all make sense!

Helpful Links! 

Polarity

Bond Polarity and Electronegativity

Second Lecture

The second lecture had me all confused. Resonance and shapes of molecules and electron geometry. Man that was some pretty confusing stuff I'll tell yah! It took me awhile to get but I finally understood it. The shape is just how many bonded entities there are and pay attention to lone pairs. The electron geometry is just where the electrons are found. If you have two bonds and two electron lone pairs the electron geometry is tetrahedral. It took me a bit to piece it all together but I finally got the click and everything came together! Also the online practice tests helped out a lot in helping me understand all of the things we learned. Resonance tripped me up the most though. When we added polar and nonpolar it frazzled my brain as well! No lone pairs=nonpolar. Nonpolar is symmetrical. Polar is just the unsymmetrical shapes with lone pairs. Only polar shapes are trigonal pyramidal and bent molecules.

Above is Resonance 

Helpful Links!

Sigma and Pi Bonds: Hybridization Explained!

Bonding-polar vs nonpolar molecules -keeping it simple

How To Tell if a Bond is Polar or Nonpolar (the super easy way)

Bonding Models and Lewis Structures: Crash Course Chemistry #24

Chemical Bonding

So at first I semi understood the first lecture. It made sense but once I got to the Lewis Dot Structure with have need share and formal charge I got a little confused. But I quickly understood it better when we had that lab in the library. It was fun to draw on the tables! Plus it was good to have models as well and visually see the molecule. Working in groups helped me too. We all collaborated and helped one another out. I hope sometime in the future we can do that again!

Helpful Links!

These links helped me for studying for the test! I would strongly recommend reviewing these over! These are for visual people (or anyone in general but it helps visual people) that need to see how everything works. These videos are kinda long but trust me they are worth it. They go in depth! I hope this helps all y'all!

Group trend for ionization energy
Period trend for ionization energy
First and second ionization energy
Electron affinity
Electronegativity
Metallic nature

Periodic Trends

Today in class we learned about periodic trends. I understand about 3/4 of it. I'm kinda worried because the test is on Thursday and I'm not fully understanding this. I get that atoms get bigger from top to bottom and right to left. I understand that ionization energy is greater from left to right. But the other one I don't get. I get that atoms get smaller or bigger by that if they lose or gain electrons but I don't get the other energy about gaining electrons and how it's gains energy left to right when non metals don't need much energy to accept electrons since they automatically do. I get it takes more energy for ionization for non metals to give away electrons since they normally don't do that. I don't know I'm just very confused right now.

Quiz in Chem!

As we all know the morning of the quiz is always stressful. Everyone is in the classroom repeating stuff over and over to make sure they have it down. I was practicing writing everything down correctly on my periodic table. I actually did pretty well on the quiz because of that and instantly writing all the formulas down once I got the quiz. I advise everyone to take 5 mins before the quiz and look at formulas and practice writing them down. Then once the quiz comes write it all down so it's fresh in your mind and you won't have to worry about remembering all of it. It's helped me! I studied my butt off for the quiz and it payed off because I got an A which was what I was hoping for!! Practice makes perfect!

Electron configuration

I was so angry at the school for doing a freaking fire drill in first hour when we had a FULL lecture day!!! Absolutely terrible. To top it off I wasn't quite understanding what electron configuration really was. But later I got a hold of it. Honestly this stuff is pretty tricky. I mean it's easy to find an element and just follow along the s, d, p, and f blocks. But the first day I learned all of it was stumped. It takes practice and time to learn. Most of all it takes patience! I'm just glad that the exceptions are pretty easy and they are basically in the same family or group and there r only six of them we have to know. But drawing the electron configuration did confuse me! But thankfully I got everything down!

Wavelength

At first I was really confused about wavelength and how to calculate it and add the equation for energy. I was honestly a mess. But I did a lot of the practice problems and I learned it quickly. Now that I look back at it, I just laugh at how silly I was for not getting it at first because it's pretty basic for the most part. In a way I think it's pretty cool that we can measure wavelengths or frequency or energy of a wave that we can't even see!! We can do all these things with chemistry! I think that's pretty cool! I can go up to someone who's wearing a red shirt and say hey ur shirt is giving off 7.0 x 10-7 meters in wavelength and is  4.3 x 10 E14 Hz. That's pretty freaking awesome!

Flame Test Lab

I thought this lab was amazing! I learned a lot about how metals can give off certain colors that can be used in fireworks! The flame test was the coolest lab because we got to deal with fire while learning about which metal burns what flame color. My favorite was Lithium because of the nice red color! The copper green was pretty cool looking too! I thought it was specially fun to have an unknown so we could guess the metal used. It really put knowledge and fun all into one lab!