One of my goals as a homeschool teacher, has been to make sure my kids were capable of critical thinking. This is something I worry that our public schools do not encourage. They seem to want more compliance and fewer questions. Some teachers even become aggressive to students when questioned too deeply. But not me.

Preschool

Preschool age children seem to ask questions every minute of the day. The challenge is to get them thinking for themselves, when appropriate. Simple prediction games are a great way to get them thinking for themselves. Play “Sink or float?” with objects around your home. Give them a bowl of water and let them test what will sink and what will float. After a few test runs, ask them to predict what the next item will do. Just be sure you check their pile of experiments before they get started to make sure they aren’t going to sink your remote or phone!

Kindergarten

Kindergarten children are ready to start trying to predict what will happen next in simple books you are reading to them. Pause every so often and ask your child questions about what they think will happen next in the story. If your child struggles, start with simple books or ones they have read before. Recognizing we won’t be finding Spot until the last page of that lift the flap book counts as reasoning. It also is helpful that they can learn to recognize patterns, which many children’s books follow.

Elementary School

My favorite activity for teaching critical thinking to elementary students is board games. Actually, both board and card games can be a great ways to introduce a lot of logic and reasoning too. A simple game like Connect Four requires kids to be looking at both their own moves and their opponents. They learn to predict where you will move next, and block your move. This is a skill also needed for the game Gobblet Jr, a favorite at our house.  Guess Who? Clue or Clue Jr and Battle Ship all teach other forms of predictive reasoning and logic, which lead to more critical thinking skills.

Middle School

Middle schoolers are old enough to read more complex books. They can start reading mysteries and try to piece together clues to figure out answers. Teaching kids about marketing techniques that convince us to buy one brand of tooth paste instead of another, can also help them see when those techniques are used in other contexts. Read news sources and work on recognizing propaganda. Does it seem like this news source is selling an idea? Does it seem biased? How can we tell? These are things to start investigating.

This is also a great age to work on critical thinking in real world situations. Learning life skills like cooking, is a great chance to work on problem solving. Let’s say your child wants to make something for dinner, but you don’t have all the ingredients. How do you solve that problem? This is a good chance to discuss how you could choose a substitute, like using plain yogurt instead of sour cream in a recipe. It could also be a chance to be a little more creative, like throwing diced tomatoes in the blender to create “tomato sauce.”

High School

As a high schooler, your student should learn how to not only recognize a poor argument, but know how to make a good one. Critical thinking is a lesson often taught in writing classes at this age. How do you examine an idea? How do you come to a conclusion? What do you need to know to make a good decision?

This is the prefect age to read more complex article, news, and even scientific research. Work on reading those with a critical eye. Does the research seem to actually test what they said they did? Do you see any flaws in the way they did the research? Was there an actual control group?

Recently, the “research” that showed that drinking a glass of wine every day made you healthier has come under fire. It turns out, they had no control group to compare the findings. They simply compared “people who drink wine to people who don’t.” But they left out the critical factor, that those who can afford wine, generally can afford better health care, better food and may have many advantages that help them live longer. The “control group” was not from the same socio-economic level. Thus, this study was not valid. It was paid for by the wine industry and largely circulated to get people to drink more wine.