There is no doubt that chemistry is a hard subject to master especially in high school. It can get challenging pretty quickly before students have had the time to even understand the basics.

In times like these, the question is bound to arise: how can I help? 

Well, here are a few tips and tricks you can share with your child.

Memorize The Periodic Table

When talking about chemistry, parents often advise kids that they do not need to learn the periodic table beforehand. The reasoning behind this is that they’ll work with it so often that they will automatically start remembering it.

While this is fine when just starting chemistry, you will quickly realize that your kid needs to remember a lot more than just the order that an element appears on the periodic table. He will have to remember what group an element belongs to, what its atomic mass is, its abbreviation, etc.

Although it is not necessary, memorizing the periodic table can help your child immensely as that will be one of the bigger tasks in their first year of high school chemistry.

Practice Significant Figures Rules

Another important lesson that makes students despise chemistry is significant figures and their rules. This is a lesson that many students have trouble understanding and mastering as it can get pretty confusing.

Moreover, significant figures rules vary quite a bit and have many exceptions. This makes students even more angry at an already frustrating topic. 

Significant digits are so important in chemistry that many teachers will mark an answer wrong even if it was partially right, just because the student failed to write the correct number of significant figures.

The only way to master chemistry is to practice significant figures rules because you do not want your child to lose any points on tests for silly mistakes made while trying to decide how many numbers should be written down.

Test Regularly

You should test your kid’s progress regularly on the concepts that he’s learning in chemistry class or you won’t be able to help them score well when an actual test comes your way.

Letting your child wait to study till the night before a test will frustrate them even more and can practically guarantee a bad score. If there’s homework on a chemistry topic that he understands well such as electron distribution and he needs to practice more on the stoichiometry side, you should advise him to practice instead of doing the homework.

Tell him to enlist the help of a “do my chemistry homework” service while he spends time mastering concepts that you don’t feel so sure about.

Read Chapters Before Class

Chemistry is undoubtedly a hard subject to understand. This is why it is necessary to do everything to better understand the concepts that are being taught in class.

One way to do this is to read chapters before class when the teacher has already shared which topics are going to be covered. Not only will this make your child more familiar with the new material but will also start the learning process early.

For example, if he reads a chapter and does not understand something, he can spend time in class clarifying what he could not understand instead of being introduced to the concept for the first time.

Conclusion

All in all, there are many ways to not only cope with high school chemistry but rather ace high school chemistry. You only need to encourage your child to practice and prepare.