(Grades 2-3) Building Thinking Skills® provides highly effective verbal and nonverbal reasoning activities to improve students’ vocabulary, reading, writing, math, logic, and figural-spatial skills, as well as their visual and auditory processing. This exceptional series provides a solid foundation for academic excellence and success in any assessment. The activities are developmentally sequenced. Each skill (for example, classifying) is presented first in the semi-concrete figural-spatial form and then in the abstract verbal form. Students learn to analyze relationships between objects, between words, and between objects and words as they: observe, recognize, and describe characteristics, distinguish similarities and differences, identify and complete sequences, classifications, and analogies. These processes help students develop superior thinking and communication skills that lead to deeper content learning in all subjects. Teaching Support: Activities are modeled to reinforce skills and concepts. An answer guide is now included, however, a separate Instruction/Answer Guide is also available but is not required. The optional teaching guide includes objectives and focus questions that reinforce analytic skills.
About the Author
SANDRA PARKS received an M.A. in Education, specializing in Curriculum Development, for the University of South Florida and pursued doctoral studies at Indiana State University. She also received a certificate of advanced study from Harvard University. She has conducted National Curriculum Studies Institute workshops annually for the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development and provides staff development to schools across the country. Sandra served as co-director of the National Center for Teaching Thinking.
HOWARD BLACK received an M.A. in Physics from Indiana State University and did doctoral studies at both Indiana State and Michigan State universities. He taught physics at Indiana State for 28 years and in 1978 received the Distinguished Teaching Award from that university. He currently teaches math and general studies at Bethune-Cookman College, Daytona Beach, Florida, where he was given the 1990 Award for Excellence in Teaching.
