Science Chemistry

Probably chemistry, more than any other science, has become a hopeless victim of the abstraction of the modern textbook. Primary and middle school chemistry is about things like making purple cabbage turn from a brackish green in your dishwashing soap to a warm purple in vinegar. But when the student moves on to high school, there is hardly any relationship with those old things. You need to learn some of the history of the miners, chemists, printers, and apothecaries who built this science. It is an exploration of the world!

Chemistry lies in a kind of middle space with connections to math which provides its pattern, to physics, of which it is made, and to biology and geology, which it composes.

It also stands alone and is most frequently taught alone, being one of the basic three in high school science: biology, chemistry, and physics.

Unfortunately, as our understanding of chemistry has deepened, the high school curriculum has become increasingly abstract, increasingly distant from the reactions that fascinated the first chemists. Then, as it takes up a whole year, there seems to be no time to show how it undergirds biology and geology, and even botany, as holding the principles behind herbal values.

Go to the science book list [Link] for some interesting resources.

Chemistry 001: is 66 colored pages, printed on one side only. It is accompanied by a colorful, laminated, oversize chart, 19" x 25", laid out like the standard Periodic Table, but with images from the text, -- no names abbreviations, or numbers. Write-on/wipe off -- and practice the names as you learn them. You have permission to copy the images to make cards and lay out a really large Periodic Table on your living room floor or to mount them on a tapestry, as we did in class.

Images designed by the author are the work of Ana Braga-Henebry who did not expect publication, but we thought her work much too charming to keep for ourselves. Bromine page sample: |Link|