Critical And Creative 4

This product is a fun way to encourage my so to think outside of the box. He usually works on this on his own while I am working with my other children.

Lots of fun activities.

My daughter who has learning disabilities finds this book challenging but I think it's really helping her. Some of the activities are written for a classroom, but we've been able to work around them. She's been doing about 2 pages a week.

We wanted to love this - my daughter handpicked it over Building Thinking Skills for her homeschool curriculum this year based on the sample pages - but it just was not a fit for us. The major problem that plagued us is that some of the problems were simply too hard; as an adult I had difficulty puzzling out the answers without using algebra that was significantly beyond my fourth grader. Another issue was that a lot of the material required specific regional or cultural context to complete the work. For instance, the unit on trees had a word scramble of tree species that my Arizonan daughter would never have heard of. If you don't know what a beech tree is, no amount of critical thinking will help you unscramble that word. Likewise, the unit on fictional characters required knowledge of specific movie characters to complete the work. If you haven't watched Shrek, good luck with that. Finally, there is absolutely no guidance for the teacher save for an answer key. When I am only able to puzzle out difficult questions with algebra, I do so under the assumption that there must be another technique that is more accessible to my fourth grader. Without any guidance from the publisher, I am left entirely on my own to figure out what (if any) technique might be more appropriate. This was frustrating not only to me, trying to teach the material, but to my daughter, who was consequently not able to work through those sections of material on her own. After a full quarter of the year filled with tears and frustration, we finally jettisoned this book and have been sailing smooth with Building Thinking Skills 2 since.

I'm not sure if the material is too hard, or if I'm just too easy. I know this is critical thinking skills, but some of the assignments were complicated. My hope was to find something the kids could do on their own as a supplement to our required subjects in order to offer a very robust homeschool schedule. However, my child needed more help than I anticipated which made me grow weary of it. We began to do one or two pages a week rather than 1 a day. I do love that the skills they are learning are very practical and apply to the students life now rather than abstract lessons. The book is designed for a classroom setting and is not as homeschool friendly as I wish it was.