E
Success in School
very-
d a y
life in-
volves a lot of prob-
lem-solving. How do
you encourage your
children to get along
with others? What’s the best way
to help your child learn to manage mon-
ey? Should you let your kids play video
games and which ones are off-limits?
Without realizing it, you’re
making logical decisions every
day, and your kids need to learn how to
make sound, logical decisions as well.
Not just in their social and emotional
lives, but in their reading, their writing,
and their math and science explorations
as well.
In short, the child who knows how
to think logically will be a better student
who comprehends his or her reading at
a higher level, is able to think creatively
to solve math and science problems,
can communicate clearly, and may even
score higher on IQ tests.
Critical thinking is a complex skill
learned over time. It involves being able
to evaluate information for accuracy,
interpret information, make predictions
and inferences (conclusions based on
evidence and reasoning), recognize fact
versus opinion, and explain one’s think-
ing clearly.
So… it’s kind of hard. But, there
are simple ways to build these logical
thinking skills and you can begin to
teach them in easy and fun ways. Here
are some skills to work on at home to
ensure your child is a strong, clear and
logical thinker.
Analyze Analogies
Analogies are comparisons between
two different things. They show a rela-
tionship between two items. The skill
involved requires your child to first iden-
tify the relationship and then select the
words demonstrating that relationship.
The use of analogies increases under-
32 WNY Family December 2018
Five Ways to
Build Your
Child’s Critical
Thinking Skills
— by Jan Pierce
standing in virtually all areas of learning.
For example: day is to light as night
is to ____. To solve this analogy, you
first see that it is light in the daytime,
then supply the opposite concept, dark,
to night.
Or, book is to read as song is to
_____. One reads a book. What do we
do with a song? We sing it.
Analogies can demonstrate a num-
ber of relationships such as part to
whole, opposites, cause and effect, or
degree of intensity (cool is to freezing as
warm is to ____.)
You can find workbooks with analo-
gies in them or try the following web-
sites to practice solving analogies. Kids
enjoy doing them and you might create
a family game in which you create your
own analogy problems for one another.
www.funtrivia.com
(search analogy
quizzes)
www.study.com (search analogies)
www.learninggamesforkids.com (search
under vocabulary games)
Create
Categories
& Classify
Items
Sorting items for
like attributes has al-
ways been fun for kids. For ex-
ample you can sort buttons by color,
size, number of holes, shape, etc. You
can group animals into size, habi-
tats, pets verus wild animals,
stripes and no stripes, or any oth-
er categories you create. And what kid
wouldn’t want to sort M&Ms by color?
You can go further and have children
graph their information in a simple bar
graph or pie chart. Classifying items
builds both math and language skills and
leads the way to simple science explora-
tions. You’ll find lots of information on
classifying at:
www.mensaforkids.org classifying
animals
www.kidsbiology.com go to animal
classification game
www.education.com/worksheets/graphing
Identify Relevant
Information
In the process of problem-solving,
it’s crucial to be able to pull out the in-
formation that matters. For example,
consider the following sentence and the
question to be answered: Tom had four
quarters and three dimes. He also had
a frog in his pocket. How much money
does Tom have?
Obviously the frog in the pocket is
not important to determining the cor-
rect amount of money. But selecting out
only pertinent information can be quite
challenging. Go to www.study.com and
search for relevant information in math.
You’ll find videos followed by simple
quizzes to practice this important skill.
Test Hypotheses
A hypothesis is an educated guess
based on the current information known.