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Steck Vaughn Critical Thinking
What happens when you cross a classroom-oriented critical thinking course with periodic take-home newsletters suggesting reinforcement activities to be completed at home? You get a full-bodied approach that is relatively easy to use at home. This series is organized according to Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives and presents the direct teaching of these skills, which provides students with the opportunity to focus on thinking rather than on content areas. At levels C through F all six areas are covered - Knowing (classifying, fact and opinion), Understanding (figural relationships, identifying main ideas), Applying (estimating, inferring), Analyzing (abstract or concrete, recognizing fallacies), Synthesizing (planning projects, drawing conclusions), and Evaluating (judging accuracy, identifying values). Levels A and B cover only the first four. The student books (black and white with color accents) are consumable worktexts providing practice for each skill. The teacher's editions give step-by-step lesson plans for teaching each skill (first part of book) and a complete full-text answer key with teacher notes (last part of book). Each lesson plan presents a five-step procedure: define the skill, identify the steps, demonstrate the skill, practice the skill, and provide feedback. The lessons also provide three suggestions for meaningful enrichment activities although these are often group-oriented and may need to be adapted for homeschool use. The take-home newsletters mentioned are provided as reproducible masters. Please note that due to some manufacturing changes by the publisher, our current stock of teacher's editions and several of the student books have a lower print quality than they did previously. While some pages are "fuzzy" the print is still readable. ~ Janice
