While I generally don’t include middle school textbooks on the Free Textbook List, I thought Physical Science: A Smorgasbord of Knowledge was interesting enough to share with you. It’s the second book by Ian Guch that he is freely sharing with the world. The first is Chemistry: The Awesomest Science. But, before students delve into specific physical sciences, they are often introduced to all of them under the umbrella term physical science. This book endeavors to give students
Guch’s approach to teaching is to us plain English blended with more than a little humor to explain the basic concepts that all of the physical sciences build upon. He keeps it simple without dumbing it down or including advanced concepts students won’t need for years – assuming they even take more science courses in college.
Chapters are offered as individual PDF or ODT files.
Table of Contents for Physical Science: A Smorgasbord of Knowledge
- Introduction:
- Chapter 1: What is Science? What is science? Scientific disciplines, scientific method, SI units, data collection and presentation, graphing.
- Chapter 2: The Care and Feeding of Matter. Elements, compounds, mixtures, chemical/physical properties and changes.
- Chapter 3: Solids, Liquids, and Gases Intro to the states of matter, intermolecular forces, phase changes, and gas laws.
- Chapter 4: Atoms: Our Very Tiny Friends Models of the atom from the earliest Greek models through quantum mechanics.
- Chapter 5: The Periodic table Everything you want to know about the periodic table, metals/nonmetals/metalloids, and so forth.
- Chapter 6: Chemical Bonding Ionic, covalent, and metallic bonding. Naming compounds.
- Chapter 7: The Magic of Chemical Reactions Equations, moles, stoichiometry, thermodynamics, kinetics, equilibria.
- Chapter 8: Solutions, Acids, and Bases Definitions of each, concentration, pH, neutralization reactions.
- Chapter 9: Organic Chemistry Definitions, some common organic compounds, intro to biochemistry, food labeling.
- Chapter 10: Nukes Radiation, half-life, carbon dating, fission and fusion.
View this Free Online Material at the source:
Physical Science: A Smorgasbord of Knowledge
