Critical Thinking, the ability to find and evaluate evidence to try to make the best decision, is an important life skill that can be made easier to teach with The Basics of Critical Thinking from The Critical Thinking Co. We received a physical copy of The Basics of Critical Thinking for review purposes.
This year we have enjoyed reviewing several curricula from The Critical Thinking Co. You can read more about the other reviews here: Editor in Chief Review, US History Detective Book 1, and Understanding Algebra I. As you may recall, one of the things that I really appreciate about The Critical Thinking Co. is their generous copying policy. Their policy allows me to use each of these resources with multiple children. This is so helpful for the homeschoolers’ budget, to be able to use the same resource for younger siblings.
The Basics of Critical Thinking is a 146 page soft-cover book written by Michael Baker. It is designed to be used for students in the 4-9 grades, so I have been using it with Brock (8th), Adisyn (6th) and Eli (4th). Topics taught in The Basics of Critical Thinking include:
- What is Critical Thinking?
- Decisions and Conclusions
- Beliefs and Claims
- Evaluating Evidence
- Finding Evidence
- Inferring and Inferences
- Facts and Opinions
- Facts and Probable Truths
- False and Probably False
- Facts, Probably True, or Probably False
- Venn Diagrams
- Logical Connectives
- Advertising
- Agreements and Contracts
- Common Errors in Reasoning
- Arguments
- Valid and Invalid Arguments
- Fallacies
- Analogy Arguments
- Using Critical Thinking to Make Better Decisions
Each lesson begins by defining the new terms and then giving examples of those terms. (I.e. Decision: A decision is anything you choose to do or believe. Beliefs: Information that we think is true.) The lesson then dives into practice problems to help cement what the student is learning. The answers are found in the back of the book for each of the practice problems and are written out in such a way that they student can understand where they went wrong if they made a mistake on a problem.
The Basics of Critical Thinking is the type of course that makes learning seem fun and not like drudgery. All three kids have enjoyed working through The Basics of Critical Thinking. Each of the twenty lessons, could be scheduled in various ways. You could plan to do one per week, by breaking them up into smaller, partial lessons or you could move through them much faster depending on what would work well for your family. Some of the lessons involve more written discussion than others, so depending on how well your students like to write that might have a bearing on how fast they move through the book.
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Jennifer
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