Monday
Monday: What Is This Made Of, Really?
Rocket dumps the Bench supplies into a pile. Foam cups, foil, a zip bag, paper towels, a glass jar and a steel spoon.
"Week 12 is build week," he says. "I want to know what I am building with."
Raven lifts the spoon. "Steel. But steel does not grow on trees. What do you notice? None of these came out of the ground looking like this."
"The paper did," Rocket says. "Sort of. It was a tree."
Nova hovers over the pile, sorting it with her light. "Each one started as something from nature," she says. "Find the something, then find the change."
Rocket grabs the Bench Log. "Tree to paper. Sand to glass. Rock to spoon," he writes. "And the foam?"
"That one has a long story," Raven says. "It starts deep underground."
Natural resources and synthetic materials
A natural resource is something people take from nature to make things. Wood from forests, oil and gas from underground, sand and iron ore from the earth all count.
A synthetic material is one people make from natural resources through a chemical process. The atoms get regrouped into new substances with new properties.
Paper, plastic, glass and steel are all made this way. So are new medicines, some foods and some fuels.
Science standards put it simply: synthetic materials come from natural resources and impact society. This week you will trace four of them.
Why the change matters
Each pure substance has its own physical and chemical properties, and those properties can be used to identify it.
When substances react, the atoms that made up the original substances are regrouped into different molecules. The new substances have different properties from the old ones.
That is why a pile of sand is not a window, and a lump of iron ore is not a spoon. The process changes the substance, so the properties change too.
| Material | Natural resource it starts as | Kind of change on the way |
|---|---|---|
| Paper | Wood | Fibers separated, formed into sheets and dried |
| Many plastics | Petroleum or natural gas | Small molecules joined into giant polymer molecules |
| Glass | Silica sand | Melted at high heat, cooled into a solid that is not a crystal |
| Steel | Iron ore | Heated to free the iron, then combined with a little carbon |
- Read the question.
- Tap your answer.
| Statement | True or false? |
|---|---|
| A synthetic material is made by people from natural resources. | ? |
| Steel is dug out of the ground ready to use. | ? |
| The new substance in a chemical process has different properties from the old one. | ? |
| Paper starts as wood fibers. | ? |
| Making synthetic materials has no effect on society. | ? |
- ?Silica sand is dug from the earth.
- ?The sand is melted at very high heat.
- ?The melt cools into glass, a solid that is not a crystal.
- ?The glass is shaped into a flat window pane.
Write the object and your guess in the Bench Log. Check your guesses as the week goes on.
Then pick one object and write the kind of change you think it went through on the way to you.
Facts come from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Geological Survey, the U.S. Energy Information Administration and chemistry texts on chem.libretexts.org.
Wednesday's lab tests paper, foil, plastic and glass with water, bending and light. A grown-up handles any cutting.
Good sorting. Tomorrow you will follow all four journeys step by step, from the forest, the well, the sand pit and the mine.