Why Critical Thinking Is the Class Your Homeschool Can't Skip (Plus Some of Our Favorite Resources for Teaching It)

Whether they’re in elementary, middle, or high school, your kids will benefit from building critical thinking skills.

Kids learn critical thinking by actually doing it, said curriculum theorist Hilda Taba, and to do it, they need opportunities to practice creative thinking and problem solving in their everyday learning lives. Critical thinking has become a buzzword in education circles, but for homeschoolers, the skills to manipulate ideas, critically examine information, and combine knowledge in different ways may be the most important things your students learn.

You can teach critical thinking by — well, teaching critical thinking. Opportunities pop up all the time in your everyday life that call on your critical thinking skills. Practice asking better, more nuanced questions about news stories you hear on the radio or commercials you see on YouTube. Model drilling down to the very specific definitions of words — what’s the difference between analyzing and explaining? What’s the emotional difference between “qualified” and “superior?” Work on developing counter arguments for ideas — what’s the best argument someone else could make against your strongest point?

Critical thinking is one of those things that comes up naturally in life, but you may also want to consider a curriculum that helps your homeschooler develop a critical thinking toolkit in an organized way. These are some of our favorites:

Brain Teasers

Best for: Elementary

Progressively challenging exercises push students gently through the basics of critical thinking, from dot-to-dot puzzles and codes to solve to simple beginning logic problems.

Analogy Adventures

Best for: Elementary, Middle

Analogies are a great tool for critical thinking, and this curriculum helps students build the skills they need to make meaningful, intelligent comparisons between two things.

Prufrock Press Logic and Thinking Skills

Best for: Elementary, Middle

It’s never too early to introduce kids to the principles of deductive and inductive logic, and this series of increasingly sophisticated lessons is a great place to start.

Developing Critical Thinking Through Science

Best for: Elementary, Middle

The scientific method is critical thinking in action — you can think of lab science as applied critical thinking — and this program encourages young scientists to think about why an experiment is set up the way it is and how to use the information it gives them.

A Case of Red Herrings

Best for: Middle

These fun logic problems encourage students to think creatively with their solutions — this is especially fun in small groups, so this curriculum could be a great base for a homeschool co-op class.

Critical Thinking Activities

Best for: Middle, High

The emphasis in this curriculum is on mathematical critical thinking, including imagery, patterns, and classic logic. The mathematic approach is especially friendly for students who don’t love literature-based philosophy classes.

How to Lie with Statistics

Best for: High

OK, this is a book rather than a curriculum proper, and it’s an old book with old information, but it remains a fascinating look at how advertisers position data to make it serve their ends. You will never read a science article in a newspaper the same way again.

Building Thinking Skills

Best for: All ages

The Critical Thinking Company, unsurprisingly, has one of the best comprehensive critical thinking curricula out there, designed to carry students from preschool through college preparation. The Daily Mind Benders are a fun way to add a little critical thinking to your morning or bedtime routine, too.

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The Benefits of the Narrative Bibliography

When it comes to bibliographies, it’s not about the formatting — it’s about learning how to use and evaluate sources in your academic writing.

Anyone who knows me knows that I have strong feelings about formatting bibliographies. (I may have gone a little nuts texting people in 2016 when the MLA 8th edition was introduced — but only because that kind of simplification was LONG OVERDUE!) So it may surprise you that the first thing I teach my kids about writing bibliographies is not correct formatting but critical thinking. I grade bibliographies based on how well they explain what information they got from different sources and why they used those sources, and I wait until well into high school to fuss with proper citation punctuation.

That’s because the point of a bibliography isn’t to format a list to attach to the end of a paper. Emphasizing formatting over content here can make it seem like the point of research is to make a “works cited” page, not to use books, websites, and other materials to actually learn more about the topic you’re exploring. A narrative, bibliography, on the other hand, asks your student to make the research their priority.

What does that look like? For starters, a narrative bibliography is in chronological order — the order in which the student accessed information — instead of alphabetical order. In a few sentences, students explain where they started their research — “I went to the librarian and asked the librarian to help me find books on Harriet Tubman” or “I Google-searched the keywords ‘Puritans’ and ‘alchemy.’” They walk me through how they found that very first source, and then, they explain how they used it in their research: “This biography was pretty general, but it included basic dates and a timeline of Tubman’s life — some of which my other sources would actually contradict because the records aren't totally clear.” The information about how they used the source is important because it means your works cited list is more than just a list — it’s a vital, living part of the work they did for their paper.

But don’t stop there — students should also explain why they’ve decided to base part of their work on this particular source. What makes it credible and significant? The answer may be simple — “I wanted a basic resource that would give me the basic facts of Tubman's life, and this timeline provided that”— or more complex — “This is the only book-length biography of Tubman’s life available, so even though it seems like it leaves a lot of holes in her story, those holes seem to be an inevitable part of studying the lives of enslaved people in the 19th century.” This is especially important with online resources, since students have to really dig into the credibility of websites to do this in a way that a more traditional biography doesn’t always inspire them to do.

Finally, students wrap up their bibliographies by considering the reasearch they didn’t do — if they’d had more time, what additional information would they want to consider, and how would they go about looking for it? (“I was interested in the connections between Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman, and I would like to read more about the free Black people who worked against slavery in the mid-1800s. I’d start by seeing if I could find any primary source reports of events Truth and Tubman both attended.”) This is important because it reminds students that their research is part of an ongoing conversation — this particular paper may be done, but no research project is ever finished with all its ends tied up. There are always more places to explore, more ideas to consider, more research to be done.

Typically, a narrative bibliography includes a few sources that the student consulted even though if they didn’t end up contributing to their actual work. This, too, is part of research: Sometimes, works you consult don’t directly contribute to your final product, but they're still an important part of the process. (“I was excited to find a primary source interview with Tubman in an 1872 newspaper, but it didn’t include any new information.”) These go into their chronological order, too, so students can explain where they ran into dead ends, what led them to different sources, and why they ended up consulting more works than they’ll officially cite.

A three- to four-source narrative bibliography — which is usually the number of sources I ask students to include (not counting consulted sources that didn’t contribute to the final work) — typically runs three to four pages. It’s more work than a standard bibliography, but it's more rewarding, too, because it pushes students to think about the purpose and results of their research. Often, we jump right to bibliographies without helping students understand why they even matter — no wonder kids have a tendency to scribble down the required number of sources, worrying more about their formatting than whether they actually contributed to their work, By the time my kids get around to worrying about formatting, they’re already in the habit of choosing sources carefully, vetting them thoroughly, and using them thoughtfully. The commas and colons are the least important part of the equation — and, ultimately, the much easier part to teach in high school.

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Curriculum Review: The Critical Thinking Company's Vocabulary Virtuoso

If you are looking for an easy-to-use workbook to help expand your student’s vocabulary, look no further than Vocabulary Virtuoso by The Critical Thinking Co. For the purpose of this post, I’m reviewing the PSAT-SAT Book 2, which according to the Critical Thinking Co. is appropriate for grades 8-12. (They offer workbooks for younger levels as well.) 

To be honest, I didn’t plan to do formal vocabulary work with my son. He reads a great deal, and I know he already possesses a high vocabulary. But now that I’ve seen Vocabulary Virtuoso, I’m going to have him begin the book next year as he starts the 7th grade. Even though the workbook is geared towards 8-12th graders, he’s a strong reader, so I don’t think it will be difficult for him to work through it. I think it will help him prepare for the standardized tests that are required for homeschoolers in our state.

In fact, he’s already looked at it and volunteered to start using it now.  How cool is that? When he was younger, he hated doing worksheets, so I never made him do them. Now, he’s much more willing to do them, and he even seems to like them! A book like this is much easier for me because he can work through it on his own without me looking over his shoulder.

Vocabulary Virtuosos PSAT-SAT Book 2 is 187 pages long, and it contains twenty lessons. Each lesson begins with a list of vocabulary words that may be used on the PSAT and/or SAT exams. The list contains the word, pronunciation key, definition and a sample sentence using that word. 

Following the vocabulary list is six worksheets or exercises that require students to think critically and use words in different ways. For example, they will see synonyms for the word, fill in the blanks with the appropriate word, read a story that uses each word, etc. Another exercise requires them to unscramble the letters in the word, which will help them learn how to spell it correctly. They will also need to complete a sentence that shows they understand the definition of a word. I believe that going through each of these exercises slowly will help a student remember the words and their meaning.

I also like that through the exercises and stories, students who complete this workbook will also learn a little about ancient Greek history, ancient Greek drama, Shakespeare’s London, Renaissance artists, epistolary writing, U.S. musical history, types of literary conflict and many other interesting topics.

The Critical Thinking Co. is a great company with many products worth looking at. Each one incorporates critical thinking, so they aren’t your run-of-the-mill workbooks. I’ve only just started looking through their catalog and determining what we can use in the future. 

They have an awesome free critical thinking puzzle of the week you can get by signing up here.

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The Power of Thinking Aloud

Want to raise critical thinkers? Showing them — out loud — how you think critically is a good place to start.

When our children are small, we parents guide their language development by explicitly demonstrating how language works. To get our kids using language, we make exaggerated shapes with our mouths, point to pictures to make vocabulary connections when we read aloud, and quiz toddlers over animal onomatopoeia. 

When kids get older, though, sometimes that tendency toward showing children how things work can evaporate, especially when it comes to more advanced language skills. 

As children get older, language arts instruction tends to shift more and more toward a model of asking the child to do work and then telling the child what he or she did incorrectly after the work is finished. Kids are assigned pages of reading and comprehension worksheets or they’re given a writing assignment that will be critiqued by a more skilled writer after the writing is finished.

Instead of only interfering in the end product, though, wouldn’t it make more sense for that more skilled writer or more skilled reader, in this case a homeschool parent, to share his or her expertise during the learning process when the potential for knowledge building is at its greatest?

“Talking to our kids about how we comprehend will yield better results than a whole pile of comprehension worksheets. ”

Readalouds are an ideal time to model the thinking skills that you want your children to achieve. When a character innocently coughs, don’t keep what you know from your experience with reading Victorian novels to yourself. Tell your kids that a cough almost always foreshadows a character’s illness and often a character’s death. When a character dons a coat or an umbrella, talk to your kids about what you can infer about the setting from that little nugget of information. When you reach the end of a chapter, practice making predictions about what’s to come. When a sentence is confusing and you feel lost, demonstrate backing up and reading it slowly and deliberately until it does make sense.  Talking to our kids about how we comprehend will yield better results than a whole pile of comprehension worksheets. 

When it comes to writing, don’t check out after you’ve handed down an assignment. Work alongside your child to model exactly what you’re thinking as you brainstorm about a topic, organize your thoughts, and construct a thesis statement. You don’t necessarily need to complete the entire assignment yourself, but talking your child through the speed bumps that are slowing him or her down is far more effective than passing down a judgement after the work has already been done. 

Much like we teach our children habits of brushing their teeth, making their beds, or clearing their places at the table, it’s up to us to teach our children the habits of good readers and writers, and there’s no better way to do that than by graciously sharing our thoughts when we read and write.

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Philosophy at the Movies

You can always start with the collected works of Plato, but these movies help introduce big philosophical ideas that may feel more accessible on the screen than on the page.

RASHOMON

The Big Idea: Reality—and truth—is subjective

Four people tell the story of a rape and murder, with conflicting and contradictory memories of the same event. The point isn’t that someone is lying but that everyone is telling the truth — it’s just that their truths don’t match, suggesting that truth isn’t the objective reality we think it is.

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THE TRUMAN SHOW

The Big Idea: Plato’s Allegory of the Cave

This movie, about a lovable guy who has no idea his entire life is a television series that runs 24/7, is a modern take on Plato: We can never really be sure at any time that we’re living in the real world because there’s always the possibility that we’re not seeing what’s really here.

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PI

The Big Idea: The ontology of numbers 

When we talk about numbers, we’re actually talking about number values and relations based on a well-articulated body of philosophical principles that reflect our best attempt to maintain balance and harmony in the material, social, and ethical worlds. In other words, numbers have a kind of being — a fact this film illuminates.

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THE GODS MUST BE CRAZY

The Big Idea: Objects ready-at-hand vs objects present-at-hand 

Objects, like the Coke bottle in this movie, are ready-at-hand— their meaning is in their use, and in using them, we cease to notice them. Even unfamiliar objects, like the Coke bottle, may start out as objects present-at-hand, things to be considered for their qualities rather than their use, quickly become useful rather than contemplative objects.

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GROUNDHOG DAY

The Big Idea: The Myth Of Sisyphus

Camus’s idea — that if we embrace the futility and unalterability of our fates, we recognize the absurdity of existence and can peacefully accept it — plays out when a weatherman finds himself stuck in a loop, living the same Groundhog Day over and over again.

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I ♥ HUCKABEES

The Big Idea: The history of philosophy in a nutshell 

Existentialism and Asian philosophy fight for dominance in this delightfully weird movie which operates as a loose, narrative exploration of the history of philosophy masquerading as a film about a popular department store.

This was originally published in the fall 2017 issue of HSL.

(We’re Amazon affiliates, so if you purchase something through an Amazon link, we may receive a small percentage of the sale. Obviously this doesn’t influence what we recommend, and we link to places other than Amazon.)

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