Chemistry is awesome, but is too often taught as an excruciating pile of factoid memorization. Some great suggestions above for looking at simulations and other ways to bring it to life as action, not as a list of data.
Chemistry model kids are horribly expensive but can be great to play with, and make some reality out of all those facts. For instance, DS (albeit when much younger) had an absolute blast making hot ice when he could create models of the original molecules, and add, remove (evaporation!), break up and recombine at each step of the way to vividly show what was actually happening at the molecular level. All that stuff about the where/ why/ how of different kinds of bonding, which kinds happen under which circumstances, all become a lot more meaningful when you are working with actual visible molecules. Even at that young age he was (trying to
) demonstrate to classmates how the model related to the dot diagram and to other systems of writing out chemical reactions, and which kinds of bonding where taking place where and why. A 12 YO will do this at a far more sophisticated level than DS when 7 - but that kit got *me* through 2 years of university chemistry, too.
(p.s. here's a basic hot ice link:
http://chemistry.about.com/od/homeexperiments/a/make-hot-ice-sodium-acetate.htm . If you google around, you can find a ton of info on the underlying chemistry, and there is a surprising amount of different concepts that can be explored all going on in this one simple experiment, making it a neat departure point for a lot of research. For instance,
http://www.livestrong.com/article/251878-an-explanation-of-sodium-acetate-hot-ice/ ).
