High School Chemistry suggestions.

[alhempel]

For those of you who have already taught high schoolers, I will have a sophomore next year doing the new World History Guide. He has already taken General Science, Physical Science, Earth Science, and Biology. Next logical Science is Chemistry. He loves Science and Math. He has taken pre-algebra, algebra 1, and for review and solidifying will complete the Video text complete Algebra in one year finishing up this summer. Probably move on to Geometry next year. He's ready for Chem but I'm not. Any suggestions on what to use?

[8arrows]

I think it is OK to discuss various options here since Carrie has not yet written the guide that will contain her chemistry recommendation. I will try to help since you have not gotten an answer to your post. We used Apologia Chemistry. It is hard and math-based. For us to use it, I had to read and study it and sit down and work through many of the problems with the boys. It was difficult to find time to do this, balancing it with all the other needs of my family. I have looked at Friendly Chemistry. It looks like a program that would not require the same time commitment, but some may not deem it rigorous enough. Personally, I would use it, especially if your student is not headed into a STEM major. Carrie did mention the college textbook she is using with her son, but I do not remember the title. We did try Spectrum, as did Carrie. We had different issues, but neither of us ended up using it. For me, in an attempt to make the reading succinct, we were not getting the full picture. We also had ordering issues. You may be able to search to find out why Carrie did not choose to use it. I think it involved safety issues with some of the chemicals. My daughter is using the CHEM 101 DVDs alongside the integrated physics and chemistry recommended in the geography guide. She is not using the extras they suggest to make it a course. The videos are "lighter" than the other options we are discussing. I think they are a great introduction to chemistry though. I think Chemistry is a hard subject to find a good fit. One of my boys ended up finishing his chemistry credit at community college. If I was going to use one of the major textbook publishers in the future, I would probably use the online options for video help. Since my daughter will be taking biology next year, I have time to wait and see what Carrie recommends. You do not have that leisure.

[arstephia]

We are using Spectrum Chemistry and haven't had any major issues. I contacted the publishers with a couple questions before ordering and got a good response. My items all came quickly. As for the labs, we haven't had any issues with that either. This is a new edition, so I don't know if maybe some problems of the previous one have been ironed out? I don't like some of the narrative textbook tone, but I didn't like that with Apologia either, so I think that is a personal issue I may just have with textbooks in general.