PreKindergarten Thinking Skills & Key Concepts

This highly-effective, standards-based, 120-page book is a research-based instructional program that teaches beyond most state and Common Core standards by:

Improving children's observation and description skills
Developing academic vocabulary
Developing thinking skills that underlie content learning (describing/defining, identifying similarities and differences, sequencing, and classifying)
Improving students' understanding of key concepts in mathematics, social studies, and science
Students completing structured exercises to write sentences and paragraphs
Carefully sequencing lessons to develop thinking skills
Employing language integration techniques to teach thinking skills and key concepts

Academic Vocabulary Development
The program builds academic vocabulary using these important concepts: describe, compare and contrast, and classify colors, geometric shapes, family members, food, jobs, vehicles, buildings, and position.

Observation Skills
Observation lessons involve concrete examples using detailed photographs to develop observation skills. The student book provides activities that students may use to clarify their thinking and learning by peer and class discussion.

Spatial Thinking Skills
    • Describing Shapes – naming shapes, finding shapes to match a description, describing characteristics of a shape
    • Similarities and Differences – matching and combining shapes, producing equal figures, figure completion
    • Sequences – recognizing and producing the next figure in a sequence
    • Classification – classifying by shape and/or color, forming classes, depicting overlapping classes
    • Using positional and directional words

Verbal Thinking Skills
    • Describing – matching a picture to a description, describing people, animals, or objects shown in pictures, part/whole analysis
    • Similarities and Differences – selecting similar people, animals, or objects, explaining similarities and differences
    • Sequences – ranking objects or people by a significant characteristic
    • Classifications – explaining characteristics of a class, exceptions, sorting into classes

Mental Models
This book teaches the characteristics outlined in its mental models needed to describe or define a concept.

How We Know It Works
    • Increased scores on language proficiency and cognitive abilities tests
    • Increased scores on normed or criterion-referenced achievement tests
    • Proficient student writing
    • Increased number of students placed in advanced classes and subsequent successful performance

Teaching Support
This student book can be used with the free, downloadable answer PDF (available here) or with a detailed, 112-page Teacher's Manual which can be purchased separately. The Teacher's Manual provides instructions to teach the lessons using research-proven methods that promote students' thinking: direct instruction, cooperative learning, whole sentence responding, and language integration activities. The Teacher's Manual physical book is in black and white, but the eBook version is in color.

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Manipulatives - (Required, Sold Separately)
PreK Thinking Skills & Key Concepts requires the use of Attribute Blocks (required, sold separately).