Chemistry ugh!

Over the last few weeks we've been looking at Chemistry, nothing too indepth as my daughter's love lies with animals but I just want her to have an understanding of the subject upto GCSE level and then if she takes it further that's up to her.

Having never studied Chemistry myself I felt very much out of my depth and I have to admit it, I have been putting it off and didn't go out of my way to encourage my daughter to learn about it. We've done the usual experiments because they were fun but nothing too serious. We used the Chemistry kit we bought way back when my son was interested but he just got on with it and didn't need me to interfere at all except to clean up the exploded blue ink off the kitchen ceiling ;o)

However after reading a lot of books and visiting many websites I now feel I have a thorough enough understanding of the Periodic Table to explain it to my youngest.

We started off by doing a little atomic structure, obviously using as many sweets and marshmallows as we could, guaranteed to get my daughter's interest. We also played this game of elements trading cards and visited these websites One, and website two.

Then finally we got around to The Periodic Table and visited these websites: one, two and three and four is the answer key. We also did some chemical bonding, photographs to follow after I've taken them off the camera. All in all it went quite smoothly and we've enjoyed it so far... I think that might have a lot to do with the sweets though :o)