[Catalist] Chemistry Resources - A review of 2 Books

[Leon Harris]

Greetings to all!

I have had a fantastic Future Science PD, and wanted to share some loot 
that I scored which I hope will help out colleagues in Chemistry Y12.

I got my hands on 2 little books.
Two of them are in the form of study guides and they are:
Unit 3 Chem Notes, A summary of VCE Chemistry Unit 3. 4e, Jennifer 
Willis, pub Nelson/Cengage, 2016
Unit 4 Chem Notes, A summary of VCE Chemistry Unit 4. 4e Jennifer 
Willis, pub Nelson/Cengage, 2016

I draw these books to your attention because they may provide an 
alternative to the excellent Lucarelli & Proctor books that we often set 
our students as suggested/optional revision material. Each book is 
approximately 100 pages.

The writing style is crisp, minimalistic on words and includes both 
sample "type" questions and "things to remember" - ie common "gotchas". 
Each "unit" has its own glossary and revision check list.
This is a very student-friendly format, highly focussed on exam 
performance. SHE is covered in an embedded manner. For example, when 
looking at fuel content of substances, bioethanol and biogas production 
is well covered, together with environmental impacts and a nod to 
current areas of research. (Oh man I hate biogas. I once was in charge 
of fixing up a hopelessly overloaded biogas plant that just continued to 
wash out all its microbes. We spent a fortune on sewerage bills as a 
result!).
In my opinion, these a well written and helpful. They cover a lot of the 
new material in ATAR well, and provide some useful supplementary 
questions. They don't pretend to be a complete textbook, but rather form 
a useful set of practice material, together with some condensed, notes 
to remind/help the student complete the question sets.

In summary, although each of these two books are approximately $30, and 
there are two for Y12, they provide some good supplementary material 
which may help "polish" your students for their WACE. I am grateful to 
have them, and I think that most schools would benefit from at least one 
set, if just for teacher resources.

Cheers,
Leon