As part of the TOS Crew, I received the Language Smarts C student book from The Critical Thinking Co. My girls and I love this workbook! It is 314 pages of quality critical thinking skills material for the second grade level. Skills that are covered include:
- following and writing directions
- mnemonics
- palindromes
- rhymes and riddles
- correct word usage, such as good/well
- subject/verb agreement
- synonyms and antonyms
- homonyms
- homographs
- root words, suffixes, and prefixes
- categorizing
- literary elements
- letter writing
..... and much more!
While the introduction states that this book can be used as the core of a language arts curriculum, I found it more to our needs to use it as a supplement. Actually, my girls complete the activities as a team, allowing them to learn from one another and practice verbalization and listening as they cooperate to complete each activity page.
So far, what I have observed from the activities in this book is that they are geared toward the higher level thinking skills, rather that simply recalling facts and information. Allow me to quote from the Teaching Suggestions section (p. v)...."The activities require students to analyze a variety of diagrams and apply problem solving skills. Targeted thinking skills include convergent and divergent thinking as well as inductive and deductive reasoning. Students will learn to recognize, analyze, and sythesize information."
While most language arts curriculums I have had the opportunity to use do include critical thinking sections, they are normally small, scattered sections. Language Smarts C provides enough activities to do at least one and more often more each day of the school year.My girls are first and second graders, and I have honestly been surprised how they remind me when it's time to do "critical thinking" as we refer to these activity pages. They enjoy the challenge of each activity, and I am very impressed by the variety of activities and the quality presented in this book. The pages are glossy and colorful, yet they still copy well in black and white, too. We normally open up our Language Smarts C at the conclusion of our regular reading and language arts class time. The activities are challenging, but not frustratingly so. They are normally able to complete each one with minimal assistance from me. However, I will say this--I firmly believe that it is imperative that we model and verbalize critical thinking skills, so I don't simply check their answers. I want to make sure they understand the logic behind what they're doing. I can see the brain exercises this book is guiding them through, but they just consider this a treat before recess!
Something else that I really, really appreciate is that it's okay for me to make copies to use with them! Not many companies allow that these days.What's the cost? This 320-page, reproducible workbook is $39.99. Seems like a lot, I know, but consider this. In my case, I have 3 kids, which means that figures out to about $13.34 a child since I can make copies. You can actually see sample pages when you click here for the sample pages, or here, which is a link from the Language Smarts C page to the answer key pages. This product is one of a series, and you can check out the others here, as well.
The Critical Thinking Co. offers other products you might be interested in as well. You can check out a number of freebies on their site, too.
No comments:
Post a Comment