By Teresa Bondora.
If you lived in another country in the middle 1800s and you were an investor you’d have to ask yourself, America or New Zealand? As Americans we hear gold rush and automatically think of California. But at the very same time that we were having our gold rush, New Zealand was having a gold rush that made ours look like a gold “take-your-time”. When gold was found in California in America, it was also found in the South Island of New Zealand in Marlborough and the West Coast.
You think we had a large influx to California? For Americans, the influx was mostly Americans from the east travelling to the west to establish themselves and colonies along the west coast belonging to Mexico. The South Island of New Zealand saw immigrants come from Europe, China, Great Britain and Australia.
But why is gold so valuable that it changed history? It created kings, and changed lands, it changed countries and their ownership, it changed citizens and made them change homes. It created power and poverty. But when you look at it on the periodic table, it just sits there mixed in with the rest of them. Not better, not worse, just Au, fourth row down, eleventh item over. When we think of gold, we think of jewellery, hard gold substance that withstands corrosion and is sturdy, valuable and plentiful. The truth about gold and really cool lessons are in your very near future, I suspect.
Number 79
Gold is an ancient metal, meaning, its use is hard to trace back to the exact person who discovered it. It is one of the few that have been known since antiquity and probably one of the very first metals to appear on the scene of human history. When we run into an ancient element on the periodic table, we find that it was named very long ago usually in Latin and so the name and symbol given to it are Latin or sometimes Greek based. For gold, the latin term is Aurum.
Throughout history gold has been associated with many things. Its symbol is the sun, a circle with a dot in the middle, it represents, the masculine, giver of life, power and virility. Where silver is its bride, the moon, femininity. Gold can be ingested in tiny amounts and can be purchased as food grade for garnishments for food. The body has trace amounts of gold in it from natural sources or from dental crowns.
The cool thing about gold for medical use is that in the near future science is looking at using it as an injectible for MRI or other scans. Gold, for some reason, isn’t toxic to the human body like lead or cadmium can be. It can also be broken down into nanoparticle sizes and injected where it will then latch onto unhealthy cells, pointing the doctor to the diseased tissue or cancer. The body then slowly rids itself of it. Gold has a verbal history of being a tonic for the heart and an aphrodisiac. But no studies have been done in these areas.
So What’s the Skinny on Gold?
Well, gold is hard to find. And when you do find it, it isn’t just lying there in nice sheets. It’s usually in tiny pebbles or tied up in rock. So mining it is actually difficult and labor intensive. The pure metal is soft, kind of like putty and so was originally used as wall decoration, sword decoration, pressed onto crowns, etc. It was used in ways where it shone brightly but wasn’t required to be sturdy, like jewelry needs to be. It wasn’t until alchemists learned about alloys that gold became usable as a tough metal for jewellery and coinage. (Learn about alchemy in my book, The Fearless and Simple Guide to The Periodic Table Book 2.)
So gold was rare. It was hard to find, hard to mine and was very soft. Only those with the time to do this could have gold, that meant the wealthy kings. But gold alloys were strong and very resistant to corrosion and that’s why we still have cups and jewels from thousands of years ago made with gold.
The coolest fact about gold is that supposedly half of the world’s supply of gold is held at Fort Knox by the United States Treasury department in Kentucky. Weird huh?
To Do
So grab a file folder. We are going to make a lapbook on gold! Suggestions for the cover are the Aztec sun, or a hand drawn sun and then the symbol of a circle with a dot in the center. Draw or cut out the periodic table square number 79 and paste it on the cover.
For the inside, sections for gold can include, photos from ancient artifacts like crowns, a gold chalice, Incan and Aztec pottery and artifacts and anything related to the Vatican.
Bullet facts about gold as an element, malleable, gold coloured, transition metal, number 79, symbol Au from Latin, Aurum. Atomic Weight 196.97 amu. Orbital shells for electrons configured as 2 in the first shell, 8 in the second,18 in the third, 32 in the fourth,18 in the fifth and 1 in the sixth.
Grab some gold coloured metallic spray paint. My son really enjoyed this. Find things to paint gold to place inside the lapbook. My son spray painted a small pine branch and then put it in a pot filled with sand. It’s now a decoration in my room. Paint a leaf and call it gold leaf.
Gold as food, you can order gold flake and use it on baked goods. Place some of this in the lapbook or make some gold decorated baked goods and invite family over to eat some metal. Take photos of them for the lapbook.
Be sure to write all the headings in metallic ink pens in gold of course! Or gold coloured gel pen.
Of course send Stephanie some pictures for her site and be sure to let her know you enjoyed her site and this article.
If you want more support and fun reading for homeschooling, go to our home page
If you want to know more about science and homeschooling click to me at www.howtoteachscience.com
Teresa Bondora
(N.B. New Zealand spellings used throughout.)
