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Building Thinking Skills Primary Student
Start building critical thinking skills early with your students. These basic skills include grouping and organizing, comparing objects, identifying, sequencing, describing, analogies, and more. Photos are in full color and are used as concept illustrations (turkey is a photo of a turkey, boat is a photo of a boat, etc.) Manipulatives are required and sold separately. This book is reproducible for family and classroom use and pages are perforated for easy removal. A brief glossary and further descriptions for specific exercises are provided on the end pages. 266 pgs, pb. ~Rebecca
This colorful, engaging 272-page book develops critical thinking skills necessary for success in reading, writing, math, science, social studies, and standardized tests in Grades K-1. It uses a series of lessons with math manipulatives and language integration techniques to teach thinking skills. This program is designed to:
- Improve young children's observation and description skills
- Stimulate vocabulary development
- Clarify thinking processes that underlie content learning (observing, describing/defining, identifying similarities and differences, sequencing, classifying, and recognizing analogy)
- Improve students' conceptualization of mathematics, social studies and science concepts taught in the primary grades
The five cognitive skills developed in this series (describing, finding similarities and differences, sequencing, classifying, and forming analogies) were selected because of their prevalence in academic disciplines and their frequency in objective tests. Since improved school performance is an important goal of thinking skills instruction, many variations of each of these thinking skills are promoted in the activities.
Thinking skills are sequenced in the order in which a child develops intellectually. A child first learns to observe and describe objects, to recognize the characteristics of an object, and then to distinguish similarities and differences between the objects. Describing, comparing, and contrasting skills are necessary to a child's ability to put things in order, to group items by class, and to think analogically.
Manipulatives - (Required, Sold Separately)
Building Thinking Skills® Primaryrequires the use of Attribute Blocks and Interlocking Cubes (required, sold separately).
Teaching Support - (Optional, Sold Separately)
Activities are modeled to reinforce reasoning skills and concepts. A Teacher's Manual eBook, optional, is sold separately.
This is a very complete thinking skills program, covering all of the figural and verbal skills your children are likely to see on a standardized test. The publisher, Critical Thinking Press, states that Building Thinking Skills is "designed to significantly improve verbal and figural skills in four important areas: similarities and differences, sequences, classifications, and analogies. Proficiency in these skills is the cornerstone of success in all academic areas, on standardized tests, and on college entrance exams." They have scads of testimonials documenting the correlation between use of this series and increased test scores. We have no doubt that all the practice you get in using this series would, indeed, improve test scores. More importantly, many of the specific skills practiced here also have application in different professions. Other skills would seem to generally improve your ability to "see things" in different ways or train your mind to stretch in different directions.
The broader goals of this series are translated into specific skills and exercises within these areas. Learning is spiral within skills, within books, and between levels. That is, exercises progress in sophistication and scope within each book, and from level to level. This translates into several hefty worktexts full of practice exercises that children actually enjoy doing! Except for the Primary level, students can work pretty much on their own, proceeding as quickly through the series as they're able. If you're starting an older child in the series, however, use the suggested grade levels for proper placement.
This level was rewritten in 2008. Activities begin using concrete materials, so you will need to use attribute blocks and interlocking cubes (mathlink or multilink); please see our Math section if you need information on these. About half the book uses these manipulatives to help the child understand the concepts of same and different, classifying, sorting and grouping. Once the child has mastered skills with these tangible objects, pages progress to pictorial representations of real-life people and things family members, foods, animals, occupations, vehicles, and buildings. These are shown by full-color photographs. Also at this point, printing (ball and stick method) becomes a part of the course; as you can do these exercises orally, it is optional whether or not the student prints the answers. The final chapter covers analogies, the acid test as to whether the child understands the classifying and grouping of previous chapters. Activities are designed for one-on-one instruction, and answers will likely be apparent to the instructor.
s/c.
Product Format: | Paperback Book |
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Brand: | Critical Thinking Company |
Grades: | K-1 |
ISBN: | 9780894558870 |
Length in Inches: | 11 |
Width in Inches: | 8.5 |
Height in Inches: | 0.75 |
Weight in Pounds: | 1.85 |