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Atoms are the building blocks of all matter. Everything is made up of atoms.
Even you are made up of atoms! Woah!
We can't see individual atoms with the human eye as they are just so small. Even the most powerful microscopes struggle to see them. More than 10 million atoms of hydrogen would be able to fit on a pin head. Wow, that's small!!
Because we can't easily see atoms, we can picture atoms as small balls, and when we draw them we often just draw small circles. Each small circle would represent a single atom.
Different things are made of different types of atoms. A piece of gold, for example is made up of lots of gold atoms. Oxygen is made up of oxygen atoms.
All atoms of the same type would be drawn as the same size and colour circle - they all need to look exactly the same. Atoms from different elements would be drawn as different colours, and maybe even different sizes. So you can easily work out if a picture of a molecule shows just one type of atom or many. Let's see a molecule of water below....
You can see that the oxygen atom is red and quite big, and the hydrogen atoms are white and a bit smaller. It shows us that water is made up of two types of atom - oxygen and hydrogen.
But now let's look at hydrogen:
Both atoms are identical. The same colour and size. That tells us that hydrogen is only made up of one type of atom.
Ready to put your knowledge of all things atomic to the test?
