Building Thinking Skills Primary [Paperback]

Book Description

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 on any assessment test.

Product Details

• Paperback
• Publisher: The Critical Thinking Company
• ISBN-10: 0894558870
• ISBN-13: 978-0894558870
• Product Dimensions: 10.9 x 8.5 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #147,965 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars If you are looking for a product that will exercise your child's brain, LOOK NO FURTHER!, July 26, 2008

By 

psalm25v4 - See all my reviews

This review is from: Building Thinking Skills Primary (Paperback)

If you are looking for a product that will exercise your child's brain, LOOK NO FURTHER! This is it! This workbook is just what it claims to be. Providing "highly effective verbal and nonverbal reasoning activities to improve child's vocabulary, reading, writing, math, logic, and figural-spatial skills, as well as their visual and auditory processing". When your child is finished with this book, you child will be able to "analyze relationships between objects, between words, and between objects and words as they", "distinguish similarities and differences", and "identify and complete sequences, classifications, and analogies".
And best of all: Each activity has directions that are EASY TO UNDERSTAND, therefore, EASY TO TEACH.
Although the workbook pages are not perforated for easy tear out, all pages are reproducible.
In my opinion, each lesson should take about 10-15 minutes which is perfect for your little fidgety ones. As far as ages are concerned, I feel this workbook would be best suited for children between the ages of 4-6, give and take.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Fantastic Series, July 28, 2011

By 

M. Pizzullo "Sonuvspam" (Trenton NJ) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Building Thinking Skills Primary (Paperback)

I have to disagree with the first two reviewers, this is an excellent series and unique in it's content. One reviewer criticized it because she didn't think it was challenging enough, and another, in a nutshell, felt it was too hard...I'd say both could have benefitted by a more appropriate pairing of the books' level to their kids' levels. There are 5 or 6 books in series, and this is the second one. They should be started at about 3 and followed through to the last...exercises like this are designed to enhance intelligence, not accumulate facts. They deal with classification, analysis, comparison, spatial rotation...all abtract skills that are touched on in other courses, but I know of no other curriculum that presents such a thorough, graduated course of these types of exercises, at a pace appropriate enough to allow a growing brain to develop the neurological connections that separate truly great minds (that process and understand information) from the rest (which may store lots of information, but don't utilize it as effectively)

Fun Fact - the brains of people who have been trained in certain complex intellectual feats (multiligualism, musicianship, advanced mathematic and abstract reasoning) early in childhood and continued in adulthood actually WEIGH MORE, upon autopsy, that the brains of those who have not. An abundance of exercises of this sort will actually force a physical improvement to the organ of the brain itself in the same way an abundance of bench presses will force a change in one's pectoral muscles. The fact that the material didn't hold a child's interest speaks more to the parent's own distaste for the material...my daughter absolutely loves her "puzzle books"

Also, both reviewers mentioned the fact that you the book requires a set of shape tiles to do the exercises. So? One even said she bought 12 other books and study aids, and was prepping her child for some Type-A personality kindergarten achievement test...yet she objects to buying a set of attribute blocks? I think one had an agenda, and one was out of her comfort zone, but those parents that will embrace this for what it is, present it with enthusiasm and see it through to the end will see their children blow past their peers in both the college exams and life's many little tests, regardless of where they place on some kindergarten entrance exam.

11 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Totally disillusioned, July 12, 2010

By 

Dani Dumitriu - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Building Thinking Skills Primary (Paperback)

I bought this book as part of a large effort to buy every book needed for preparing my children for the NYC G&T testing (OLSAT) for admission to kindergarden. This was one of the most recommended books throughout my online searches of what parents had bought and liked. When I finally got it I was incredibly disspointed and ended up not using it almost at all (though I used at least a dozen other books and study aids). One of the most annoying thing about the book is that you need to also buy a bag of shapes, which are necessary for about a third of the exercises. Also, my children found it on the easy side. They liked it, but they were clearly not challenged to the same level as with other books. We breezed through the shape exercises in just one sitting, and they got everything right, leaving us no room for improvement or discussion.