Apologia Exploring Creation with Chemistry

by Kristy Plourde

This is the updated text (3rd edition) of Apologia's high-school chemistry course. ONLY THE TEXT is included--not the solutions manual or the test booklet.

Genres: School, Science

651 pages, Hardcover

First published October 5, 2015

Reviews

[jess h. · Rating 1 out of 5]

no.

[Kaitlyn Foreman · Rating 1 out of 5]

I’ve never cried over a book more.

[Thea Knightley · Rating 1 out of 5]

i’m not actually done with this yet.

horrible. horrible horrible. i CRIED over this book. SHED ACTUAL TEARS! it’s the worst.

it assumes that you’re going to be doing nothing but chemistry for the whole rest of your entire life, and so it teaches you WAY TOO IN DEPTH. COME ON!

i’m just a girl trying to get my last science credit so i can go to college and MAJOR in ENGLISH! BROTHER! WHY YOU GOTTA BE LIKE THIS?

0 out of 10 would not recommend.
10 out of 10 would chuck this in an incinerator, or lake of fire, or normal lake, or anything that would permanently destroy it forever.

[Tammy Schilling · Rating 3 out of 5]

The upside is that experiments can be done at home. But it's excessively wordy and not written in a scientific style. To me, it's attempts to be more approachable actually made getting through it's chattiness to the actual material harder.

[Sophia Valencia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Man! This book was a doozie! Good concepts and everything, I would ditto Thea’s review FOR SURE 😂

[Isabel · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a 100% amazing book!! If you don't enjoy chemistry, you will after reading this textbook! The author knew what she was doing when she wrote this!

[Amy Coers Koenig · Rating 3 out of 5]

I lead a class for homeschoolers that met once a week that used this book for high school chemistry. Typically we would spend two weeks per module. We would do the experiments together and go over the review questions and practice problems during our time together.
I do not have an extensive chemistry background. I did take an introductory chemistry class in college many years ago. I'm not afraid of science or math so I was willing to jump in to lead the class. I lead a similar class two years ago with the previous edition of this book, but we had a smaller amount of time allotted and we mostly just did the experiments. I did have a couple of chemists that I knew willing to come in for a few sections as guest lecturers.
If you use this book, please look for the Errata from the publisher for all of the errors in the book. I found quite a few more errors that have been added to their document.
Overall, I believe that this is a good college prep chemistry class. It has the same issues that most introductory chemistry texts do, what to cover in what order and how deep to go into a topic. The book is not perfect, but it met the needs of our group along with the Student Notebook and we learned some Chemistry along the way. I did feel the need to take the test before my students so I could tailor some of our discussion topics to how the test presented some questions.
I liked the scope and sequence of 3rd edition over 2nd edition.

[Trudy Pomerantz · Rating 2 out of 5]

I used the 2nd edition of this textbook to teach my kids and some of their friends, but now I am teaching a friend's youngest child and the program she uses has updated to the 3rd edition. While I see some improvements from the edition I used, there are still so many things I dislike about this text. If you have the old edition, this textbook is not enough of an improvement to justify the increased cost. My perspective is from a Ph.D. in polymer chemistry who chose to stay home with her kids and ended up homeschooling them through high school.

In no particular order:
1. This textbook closely follows the second edition where Wile was the author. Yet, the author for the third edition is Kristy Plourde with only a mention on the copyright page of the 2nd edition.
2. The example used in both the second and third edition when using a ruler to measure to start at 1 rather than the 0 mark. Seriously, if your ruler has worn away at the end and is defective, go and buy a new ruler. Don't start measuring at the 1.
3. It appears that the test for module 2 has a question on it that is considerably more difficult than any of the questions that I noticed in the on-your-own questions throughout the module or in the practice problems at the end of the module.
4. I find the text FAR TOO WORDY.

I will probably update this review as I continue to use this text.

[Ari · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mixed feelings about this book for sure. Obviously it's my tenth grade chemistry course, but I absolutely don't like chemistry. Since this is an AP course, it was very difficult to understand, and I feel like I would need to read it 2 more times in total before absolutely mastering Chemistry. However, I'm not going to need as advanced chemistry as this in the future, unless I suddenly decide to become a chemist or pharmacist; so I feel that I have a pretty general understanding of basic chemistry right now. I would 100% reccommend apologia for students in the future, even though it makes me cry a lot.

[Yz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Me and my siblings tried to learn chemistry on our own with this book but in the end we ended up getting so confuesed and getting ZOOM tutoring lessons from our amazing grandma Hall who is a retired AP high school teacher who made chemistry fun!

[Caroline · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’m counting my school books.

[Charlie Plomin · Rating 3 out of 5]

So ridiculously repetitive. I know chemistry now but dear god, you don't have to repeat the same thing three times per paragraph. This book could be half the size if you cut out all the redundancy.

[Jenni Early · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pretty good...depends on what you want to get out of a chemistry class and what level of math you have done.

[leona]

i’m tired of this grandpa.

[Terri Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

Experiments are a little boring and tedious overtime… They’re not quite as advanced as I would appreciate.