Atoms: The Building Blocks of Matter

This morning I observed Miss Blodgett's chemistry class.  The students were working on a lab in which they had to build models of chemical compounds using Lego blocks to represent atoms that are rearranged in the course of the reaction.  In this lab they were mixing calcium chloride and sodium bicarbonate (baking soda).  This lab activity reinforces the law of conservation of mass, which says that the same number of atoms must exist on both sides of a chemical equation.