Earthy Mama: The Critical Thinking Company Review

Tuesday, March 17, 2015

The Critical Thinking Company Review

Age: Grades 4-5

Price: $19.99

About: Editor in Chief Level 1 by The Critical Thinking Co. is 136 perforated pages. The authors are Cherie A. Plant and Nancy Rowe. The book is broke down into 12 lessons with 69 activity pages for those lessons. The lessons include:

Content

Capitalization

Punctuation

Spelling Rules

Nouns

Pronouns

Adjectives

Adverbs

Articles

Verbs

Agreement

Conjunctions

Prepositions

Interjections

Confusing word pairs

Negative words

Homophones

Homographs

Run-on sentences

Sentence fragments

Each lesson starts out with teaching the lesson and going over the topic. After that then there is activity pages in which the child works at correcting the mistakes in the paragraphs by following the rules taught in the lesson. The answers are also included for this book as well.

How we used: I used this with my 4th grader. She is a very smart girl but does not like to write paragraphs and sentences. She can if I make her but it kills her love for doing work. So when we got the chance to review this book we were excited. Some of the subjects we have gone over before but it was always hard getting her to write a proper sentence using the rule. With this book it was the opposite, we learned the lesson then all she had to do was go and correct the paragraph already written. We worked on this book daily. Usually we would take about 30 minutes to an hour to learn a lesson and work on a few activities or review what we had learned. At the first of a lesson we spent our time going over the lesson and the examples and going over any questions that she may have had for the lesson. We tried to spend closer to an hour on this day to make sure she understood what each topic meant fully. Then the next day we would start working on correcting the paragraphs. You can correct them right in the paragraph but there is also the option of rewriting the paragraph as well. She wasn't to fond of that but sometimes did it. Another great thing about this book is the copyright allows you to make copies of the pages in this book. This is really good when you have multiple children that could use it or if your child is having a hard time learning a rule and needs to try to do it a few times to get it.

I think that this book would be great as a supplement to any homeschoolers. This is not a stand alone program but helps build more confidence in writing rules. I also think anyone that isn't homeschooling and needs something extra to help a struggling child would want to check this out. It is a pretty easy way to get a child to get some extra practice in with not a while lot of writing, which I am sure many kids will like that. I know my daughter can't be the only one that hates writing.