Laboratory work is the essence of chemistry, and measurement is the essence of laboratory work. A hands-on introduction to real chemistry requires real equipment and real chemicals, and real, quantitative experiments. No existing chemistry set provides anything more than a bare start on those essentials, so the obvious answer is to build your own chemistry set and use it to do real chemistry.
Everything you need is readily available, and surprisingly inexpensive. For not all that much more than the cost of a toy chemistry set, you can buy the equipment and chemicals you need to get started doing real chemistry.
DIY hobbyists and science enthusiasts can use this book to master all of the essential practical skills and fundamental knowledge needed to pursue chemistry as a lifelong hobby. Home school students and public school students whose schools offer only lecture-based chemistry courses can use this book to gain practical experience in real laboratory chemistry. A student who completes all of the laboratories in this book has done the equivalent of two full years of high school chemistry lab work or a first-year college general chemistry laboratory course.
Ooooh, I wish this book had been around 15 or 20 years ago, when I could have infected my kids with it. Maybe I’ll have to wait a few years (many years!) and expose a grandkid to it … which will have an added advantage that the parents will have to deal with the messes and smells.
Odd thing, though: I looked through the table of contents, and there’s not one single solitary thing about chemistry prayers. How can the experiments possibly work?