Teacher Friendly Chemistry Labs and Activities is a high school level chemistry experiment book written by a teacher, Ms. Deanna York. She found that her students learned chemistry better by doing it, but the labs provided in chemistry textbooks were difficult to complete. Expensive materials, no flexibility, and complicated instructions and lab sheets were just a few of the issues. Even if the lab from the textbook was completed, grading was difficult and time consuming. Teacher Friendly Chemistry Labs and Activities contains 34 labs that address these issues, and it is designed to be used alongside any chemistry textbook. Some of the labs included are "Separation of a Mixture," "Calculating Average Atomic Mass," and "Flame Test for Metallic Ions."

Each lab contains a lab sheet, teacher notes, answers to the lab sheet, a lab quiz, and a lab make-up sheet. The lab sheets are typically only two pages long, and are written with instructions that are easily understood by the student. The teacher notes contain a list of supplies for the lab and any set-up instructions, along with the outcomes the teacher should be looking for and teaching tips. While lab quizzes are provided, Ms. York recommends adding the questions to the student's chapter tests instead of giving a quiz after each lab. The student lab make-up sheets are intended for use when a student misses a lab in a classroom situation, but these can also be used by a homeschool student if materials or equipment isn't available for a specific lab.

There is no master list of supplies in the book, but this is available online. Most of the supplies appear to be readily available at the local supermarket or easily ordered from an online homeschool science supplier. The instructions for the labs are clear, as are the teaching notes. There are no quiz answers available for the quizzes that I could find, but the quizzes are all fill in the blank, true or false, or multiple-choice questions, so they should be easy enough to grade should you choose to use them. There are bingo-style game cards included for review of equipment, element names and symbols, and polyatomic ions. Overall, Teacher Friendly Chemistry Labs and Activities appears to be a great addition to any high school chemistry course.

Product review by Courtney Larson , The Old Schoolhouse^® Magazine , LLC , August 2010