Atomic Models and Pancakes

I love when I can kill two birds with one stone.  The other day we were able to knock out lunch and chemistry simultaneously by building atomic models out of pancakes.

We’ve been memorizing some parts of an atom (nucleus, proton, electron, quark, lepton, and neutron).  For our models, we just focused on the nucleus (which contains the protons and neutrons) and the electrons.

We assigned a different color of M&M for each sub atomic particle.  In our models, protons are red, neutrons are green, and electrons are yellow.

While I whipped up pancake batter, the kids sorted the appropriate M&M’s into muffin cups.  (We always add flax meal to pancakes for an omega-3 boost.  Wheat germ is a great add-in also.)

I made larger pancakes than I usually do to make room for our sub atomic particles.

Once each child had a “blank atom,” we reviewed our memory sentence on atomic number.  Then the big kids learned about the mass number (protons + neutrons).  Then they each chose an element from the first 8 (because that was the maximum amount of M&M’s I was willing to let a child eat on a pancake) to model.  This was also a great time to review the first 4 elements we’ve been memorizing by number, symbol, and mass number.

Can you guess what we made?