mom3aut1not
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Joined: May 21 2005
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| Posted: Sept 25 2005 at 9:10pm | IP Logged
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Lisa,
I looked at it years ago. I also had a chemist friend check it out. IIRC (it has been several years) she said was a physical chemistry class -- "Baby P Chem" and that it covered that material well, but that she personally would want to cover other parts of chemistry as well. As a chemistry-ignorant person I can say it looked like fun. Hhhmmm. I might want to consider this for my more disabled high school student....
In Christ,
Deborah
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ALmom
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| Posted: Jan 09 2009 at 2:02am | IP Logged
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AAAh, Help!
OK, I was planning to use Friendly Chemistry for my highschooler next year for chemistry. She is almost exclusively a kinesthetic learner. My neat diagrams didn't even help her, she actually had to manipulate marbles with dad.
Now, we are bogging down in the Prentice Hall Physical Science. Honestly, teaching herself from a text is not working (duh) but getting a list of books without plans doesn't work for her either (we already tried that and had to go back to a text book with Biology which took us 2 years to bog through).
I was just coming back here to figure out that hands-on high school chemistry someone recommended because of the PH Physical Science difficulty thinking that the hands-on would get us over the edge and wouldn't hurt ($ wise)since we were going to use it for our chemistry course next year. Now  I see it has been reviewed and viewed as less than thorough for a high school course - so what do I do? Please, please someone move here so you can tutor my child!!!! I live in the middle of a booming science town and I cannot find a single person willing to tutor for any price - not in science.
I have made a few discoveries about my children's learning styles and my difficulties. My children all need a good big picture and lots of hands on for at least 2 of them. I have to have lots of detail in order to build to the big picture. I go nuts if I cannot get every piece to connect so I can follow the logic. As I try to understand the science in order to explain it to the kids, my piece building loses them in the first couple of seconds with too much talking aloud and diagram drawing. Most of my children are either very spatial big picture or very, very kinesthetic. The fact that I have no confidence in science and an extremely week background coupled by just not being very enthused for all the stress of trying to find something that works really does not help matters either.
I don't even have a clue how to teach with projects or hands on - those were the very things I avoided like the plague all through school (I always volunteered to either do all the work so I could do it myself - in terms of research and writing and leave the project making entirely to the rest of the group that hated to write. Or - in labs I was the go fetch this and that and the clean up crew. I slowed things down way too much to be actually doing any of the actual experiment  Oh, I could always do the mathematical computations with ease .
Oh, and my dear sanguine,phlegmatic, kinesthetic learner simply cannot be let loose with a subject she hates and no clear cut plans or guidance or basically the subject will never even be touched. She very specifically begged me for clearly laid out daily plans to keep her from getting forever sidetracked to more appealing things. She is staying on target with the plans for the most part and for most subjects things are moving wonderfully - but science continues to be bust.
Ok, and honestly, she doesn't have a good foundation either so whatever program has to build a simple overview and then through some sort of hands on or self correcting model, get her to add in more and more layers until we have a high school equivalent course.
Please, somebody have a plan in mind. I don't think either of us can take bogging through the rest of high school hating science.
Right now the biggest glitch is chemical bonding and how you write those things (whether it is a trichloride or just a chloride or whether or not it has a little number subscript or none at all and how all these combine together). I have vague recollections of Chemistry teachers from high school drawing energy levels on the board (and we did some sort of dot diagrams, too) and how we somehow figured things out based on how many electrons in the outer shell and whether it was full or not. Of course the PH text talks about how they don't use shells anymore though it is still a convenient way to picture things, they now talk about electron cloud or some such other model. I remember understanding it at the time, I simply cannot jog it out of my mind. I'm sure eventually dh and I will remember between us - just we'll be stymied till then.
So the problem is that she works really hard, honestly thinks she understands something, and then only finds out when she bombs the test that she hadn't a clue. At that point we have to make sure she really understands - which means her dad and I spend untold hours bogging through chemistry books trying to find other ways to explain or find the detail that we have both forgotten and the textbook assumed you already knew  . Two weeks later, we may finally have figured something out and then spend the next couple of days reexplaining it. This usually entails me forgetting that they are big picture learners so I start at step 1 and try to build up. By step 3, the child's eyes are glazed over so I back up and start picture drawing. She keeps interrupting to tell me "I know that already" with immense frustration rising in her voice. I cannot even get to the big picture till I'm finished lining up my steps (I never, ever skip a step in math, honestly - so I'm a great debugger of numerical methods stuff  ). Now we are both so frustrated and ready to scream and daddy walks in the door at which point I throw up my hands in utter frustration and ask him to try for a while. He takes over in his very wonderfully calm and steady way. (He tends to be a big picture learner too). I leave the room so I don't boil over. He comes back laughing and informs me that all I needed to do was talk less and hand her marbles. I'm scratching my head wondering how marbles would make any difference to my beautifully drawn models. In any case it looks like comprehension has occured, at which time we reconstitute some kind of assessment to measure whether or not she really can do it on her own with a new problem and whether or not she can still do it a few days later when dad's explanation isn't fresh in her head. She restudies material, takes the new test and then we move on to the next sections only to start this whole nightmare all over again. In the meantime, we waste over a months time chasing our tails. No wonder we are perpetually "behind" in science.
As my daughter very wisely observed - she needs a teacher who will present the material to her in some sort of overview - someone who knows the subject well enough to anticipate problems and test comprehension before sending her off to fail. Then maybe she could pass the test the first time and be done with the torture much sooner.
Exactly how below par is this Friendly Chemistry? I just cannot stomach doing another PH textbook - but as fun to read as MacBeths books on the reading lists are, they don't help either though I always try to have most of them around for supplemental reading (and one child does devour them and probably could base his science on these - he loves science and I don't have to worry about figuring out what he is up to. This one child, though, was probably disappointed to learn clouds were not cotton balls or cotton candy and would much rather write and act an entire play than read 1 line of any science - textbook or otherwise. If she reads it, no telling what she comes away with - there may be some odd connections she makes so totally unrelated to reality that you scratch your head wondering where that came from. IE, I really cannot just hand her living books in these subjects without some sort of plan or idea of periodic lets figure out what you know. I don't have the knowledge in science - nor the time - to design all this soooo?
This is what leaves me knocking my head against the wall wondering if there is any way I could delegate somehow. I am a lousy science teacher. Please help, we're desperate here.
Now if my 11 year old will just catch up with her - maybe he could take over the teaching. If we continue to progress at this rate, he just may.
Janet
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4Real Forums : Exploring God's Creation in Nature and Science
Topic: Friendly chemistry
