The Thinking Skills & Key Concepts First Grade workbook is designed for parent/teacher and student interaction, rather than independent work. The carefully sequenced lessons help students improve their observation skills, as well as their ability to describe, compare, sequence, and classify items. Academic vocabulary is built throughout the course. Consumable, not reproducible. There is minimal instruction in the Student Book and the Teacher Book is recommended for the interactive lessons. Families familiar with the Thinking Skills & Key Concepts series from The Critical Thinking Company may be able to effectively teach the lessons. If you elect to teach the course without the Thinking Skills & Key Concepts Teacher Manual, there is a PDF Answer Key available for free on the publisher’s website.
First Grade Thinking Skills & Key Concepts Student Book
Product Overview
- Help children improve their observation skills, academic vocabulary, and spatial thinking skills with Thinking Skills & Key Concepts from Critical Thinking Press
- Includes colorful workbook pages with illustrations and activities familiar to children
- Parent-student interactive lessons take 20-30 minutes per day
Description
Thinking Skills & Key Concepts is a new, standards-based series from the authors of our widely acclaimed Building Thinking Skills® series. It is a research-based instructional program that teaches beyond most state and Common Core standards by:
* Improving young children's observation and description skills
* Developing academic vocabulary
* Developing thinking skills that underlie content learning (describing/defining, identifying similarities and differences, sequencing, and classifying)
* Improving students' understanding of key concepts in Mathematics, Social Studies, and Science
* Having students complete structured exercises to write sentences and paragraphs
* Carefully sequencing lessons to develop thinking skills
* Employing language integration techniques to teach thinking skills and key concepts
Observation Skills
Observation lessons involve concrete examples using detailed photographs which can be supplemented with picture books to develop observation skills. The student book provides pencil and paper exercises, but students clarify their thinking and learning by peer and class discussion.
Academic Vocabulary Development
The program builds academic vocabulary and mental models of important concepts. Students describe, compare and contrast, and classify geometric shapes, family members, occupations, animals, food, vehicles, and buildings. In Grade 1 exercises also include living and non-living things, plants and animals, and land forms and bodies of water.
Spatial Thinking Skills
* Describing Shapes naming shapes, finding shapes to match a description, describing characteristics of a shape
* Similarities and Differences matching and combining shapes, producing equal figures, figure completion
* Sequences recognizing and producing the next figure in a sequence
* Classification classifying by shape and/or color, forming classes, depicting overlapping classes
* Using positional and directional words
Verbal Thinking Skills
* Describing Things matching a picture to a description, describing people, animals, or objects shown in pictures, part/whole analysis
* Similarities and Differences selecting similar people, animals, or objects, explaining similarities and differences
* Sequences ranking objects or people by a significant characteristic
* Classifications explaining characteristics of a class, exceptions, sorting into classes
* Analogies naming the kind of analogy or completing the analogy (first grade only)
Mental Models
Mental Models outline the characteristics needed to describe or define a concept. The first grade book teaches the significant characteristics of the concepts outlined in these mental models and explores each concept in great depth.
How We Know It Works
* Increased scores on language proficiency and cognitive abilities tests
* Increased scores on normed or criterion-referenced achievement tests
* Proficient student writing
* Increased number of students placed in advanced classes and subsequent successful performance
The Thinking Skills & Key Concepts series from The Critical Thinking Company actually seems like an expansion of the popular Building Thinking Skills program. Incorporating all its excellent conceptual development and expanding beyond mathematics into science and social study applications, this series takes students beyond state standards. Designed to be a discussion-based curriculum, teacher-student interaction is vitally important and, in fact, the publishers warn against trying to administer the program by handing your student a workbook page.
Program goals include
clarifying and practicing various thinking skills (describe, compare/contrast,
sequencing, classification), developing the academic vocabulary needed to
describe key concepts in mathematics, science, and social studies, and to
promote clear conceptualization of key concepts even in the primary grades
knowing these will become more complex in later grades.
The consumable Student Books incorporate instructional methods such as teaching skills explicitly, using different learning styles for some teaching, responding in whole sentences, and applying the concept in new forms. The Teacher Manuals include reduced student pages with answers, introductory information for the course and each chapter, and more. This series is an excellent choice if you desire to make sure your student is prepared for higher order thinking in upper grades and for standardized testing.
| Product Format: | Paperback |
|---|---|
| Grade: | 1 |
| Brand: | Critical Thinking Company |
| ISBN: | 9781601446589 |
| Length in Inches: | 11 |
| Width in Inches: | 8.5 |
| Height in Inches: | 0.5 |
| Weight in Pounds: | 1.25 |