Building Thinking Skills Level 2
© 2008 The Critical Thinking Co.
Like Building Thinking Skills, Level 1, this single CD contains 38 activities that provide a guided introduction to logical thinking concepts, especially related to spatial terms, classification and following directions. The activities are designed in Flash, and work fine on either Mac or Windows computers. Each activity contains about 20 problems. In a typical activity, children are asked to fill in sentences by dragging and dropping terms into the sentence. For example, you are asked to "drag the green ball with the blue triangle under the red ball with the black square." Each problem is instantly graded, so children can see their progress, and reading is required. There are two modes of play. In the adventure mode, you are required to pass each level before going to the next. You can choose easy, medium or hard -- in the hard level, you must get 95% of the problems correct in order to progress. In practice mode, you can freely access any of the games. The program tracks each child's progress when in the adventure mode. In easy mode, children are asked to label spatial relationships shown on the screen. At the hardest level, children are asked to complete verbal sequences, such as "inch is to length, as square is to (correct answer: volume)." The features are classroom friendly, and the activities -- while dry -- get children thinking about concepts they'll most likely be encountering on a typical standardized test. If you're looking for flashy graphics and sounds, you won't find it with this program. For a classroom or home school setting, this program is worth a second look.
$37, Windows, Mac OSX
Teaches: logic, vocabulary, reading, mathematical reasoning, analytical skills
CTR Rating: 84%