2H or not 2H?

No, this isn’t something about pencils – just what happened this morning.

Things are slowly getting back to normal, although it’s a new normal in a nice way. Tonight the table and chairs returned from the shed because the birth pool was collected yesterday by a superhuman courier chap who didn’t have to unpack the huge boxes at all before he could carry them into his van (unlike me!). This morning was another of those nice things that you have to keep in mind for when the little dears are whiny or trying to kill each other.

While the oldest three were having breakfast J asked out of the blue “Why is water H2O?” I was in a hurry to get to work (usually it doesn’t matter if I’m a few minutes late, but today I had to be on time) but it was too good an opportunity to let it lie – child led learning and all that. So I got the O Level Chemistry down from my mental attic, hunted for some suitable books, gave up and so switched on the computer and found a nice site about the periodic table, and Wikipedia helped me to remember how many electrons each shell could take.

J already knows a bit about atoms, and that they have protons, neutrons and electrons, so I drew a picture of an oxygen atom (without the neutrons) and put the electrons in shells: oh look, two gaps in the outer one (bit of bonus maths: 8-6). Also a picture of a hydrogen atom: one gap. Atoms want full outer shells and can share electrons with other atoms to fill them up. Gaps match up with each other (an explanation which probably makes someone who actually understands this twinge), so it takes two hydrogens to fill up the oxygen, hence H2O. Then we did carbon dioxide: oh look – carbon has four gaps so it’s CO2. K worked this one out, which was great. Finally helium – see, it has a full outer shell so it doesn’t need to share with anything, which means it doesn’t react with much. All the elements in the same column as helium all have full outer shells, so they’re like each other and don’t react much.

And then they finished breakfast ;).

Fortunately I managed to zoom to work in time and so didn’t have to apologise to the visiting Big Cheese for being late due to helping my children with their education. 🙂

9 thoughts on “2H or not 2H?”

  2. Ooh that brings back memories of my dad explaining it all to me. We haven’t really touched on any of that stuff here yet.
    And any chance of the birth story password, pretty please?

  4. Bob, I need to borrow you in a few years to explain chemistry to Aprilia! I never “got” it at all which was a bit of a problem for a lab tech really!

  6. T-Bird: I think I’ll still defer to His Beanyness as someone who actually knows what he’s talking about.

    Nice follow on today. I had to pop home to let a plumber in to service the boiler. Katy and the children happened to be still around as their trip out to park and shops etc. was delayed by sluggish children. So, while the plumber was making the boiler happy and the children were munching a little something, I showed J and K what you get if you mix 6 lots of CO2 and 6 lots of H2O: a rather nice looking hexagon thing. Do you know what this is? It’s glucose (sugar). Do you remember food chains – what’s always at the bottom? Yes, this is plants making their own food from sunlight.

    Plus you get this (3 lots of O2) left over, so plants make oxygen too. One little reaction that is fundamental to life twice over! Without it – no life. I’m not expecting them to reproduce the glucose molecule just yet :), but I think they grasp the wonder of it, which is the main thing as far as I’m concerned. It’s great that K is starting to get this kind of thing as well as J.

  7. You explain it like that and i see wonder and amazement as being possible. You explain it like Dr jackson in the 3rd year chemistry lab and i saw very little other than the clock and how slowly it was ticking 😕

  8. Wow. That’s great stuff!

    Please may I have passwords for the other posts? I can’t figure the one out for now we are 6 at all!

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