Thermochemistry Essay

1328 Words3 Pages

Instructional Purpose - “I Wonder…” Statements - Guided Reading
Instructional Purpose:
Students need to understand the importance of thermochemistry. Thermochemistry revolves around the energy (heat) associated with reactions and other materials. This field of chemistry has a variety of terms and applications that need to be understood before heading into college level chemistry courses. Terms such as temperature, specific heat, calorimeter, and enthalpy are commonly used within lab experiments. These terms also link to common items the students may see daily. Hot hands and the number of calories in food items are linked to thermochemistry.
What two places may cause students difficulty during reading?
The introduction of the term specific
Have any of you wondered about the magic that occurs within a hot hand? The hot hand is a small pouch that contains mysterious elements that combines to start a reaction that produces heat. There is a specific field of chemistry that studies the heat associated with reactions, and today we begin our journey learning about this form of chemistry called thermochemistry! Thermochemistry is a fascinating field of chemistry that contains new terms and ideas that need to be understood in order to proceed into the mathematical applications of thermochemistry. We are going to create “I wonder…” statements to help with learning about these new terms while we read the
So let’s say I read the section about heat and temperature. I learned that heat and temperature are related, but they are different quantities. This idea of difference causes me to think about how the two terms are related but different, so I began to write a statement that embraces my curiousity of these terms that will hopefully be answer in the text or through a class discussion. I wonder… how heat and temperature are integrated within chemistry. Now I shall proceed and read the next section of the text to hopefully answer my statement. So as I was reading I came across the term “specific heat,” and the definition stated that specific heat is the amount of energy needed to raise the temperature of one gram of a substance by one degree celsius or one kelvin. I learned that the specific heat is a value that is required to raise one gram one degree higher in temperature! Since I found my answer in the text, I will write down this definition by my statement, so I can discuss it later in

Open Document