In your homeschool, what are some interesting or innovative ways you have used The Fallacy Detective or The Thinking Toolbox?
Post your experiences in the comments section of this post. We’ll pick the five best responses and each will receive a free book — either The Fallacy Detective or The Thinking Toolbox.
We used the Fallacy Detective as reading material in the car. We started this when we were taking a 12 hour round trip in May, and continued on car rides to church, etc. throughout the summer. One of us read the text and then we all answered the questions, starting with the youngest one answering first, and Mom and Dad answering last. It enabled us all to study together and discuss among ourselves the principles presented. It worked great! I questioned if my kids would remember the information, but they have. They still point out errors in reasoning on television, or radio, or even from each other. It is totally amazing how well my 10 year old absorbed it. We hope to study the Thinking Toolbox together next, but we don’t have a copy yet. (Maybe this will get us one, huh?)
As long as cancer patients accept speculation as fact, the oncologist can provisionally prove just about anything to his own satisfaction.
We used logic in our Homeschool to help us identify five fallacies on cancer staging. Trivium Pursuit Blog asks…
We have used Fallacy Detective for group discussions. We have also read it aloud as a class. This is our second year with a new class reading through the book. We take turns reading it aloud and then talking about the questions and answers and laughing along the way. The new cartoons in the book really make the book inviting for the students, and they want to hang on to their books instead of putting them up on a shelf in order to read it just for fun! Imagine that! This is one of their favorite subjects.
We used The Fallacy Detective in a homeschool co-op logic class I taught. I’d read much of the chapter aloud and the students would answer the interesting questions/problems. Sometimes I’d ask them to all answer at the same time, so no one could ‘hide’ in the group. The class was small enough that I could see who said a wrong answer.
Now, 3 years later, all 4 of my former co-op logic class students are in a homeschool debate club together. As they studied fallacies briefly in the club, I like to think that getting “their feet wet” with only the first 12 chapters of The Fallacy Detective was helpful to them in the debate club. (The co-op was 12 weeks long; we could only cover part of the book.)
Btw, we loved The Fallacy Detective and I highly recommend it to everyone. (And I do mean everyone. I recommend it on e-mail lists which are specifically for the topic of politics!)
–Denise
Our family has been putting either Fallacy
Detective or Thinking Toolbox right at the end
of our family devotion time off and on over the
last 4 months because we believe that part of
“loving the Lord your God with all your mind”
means actively sharpening the minds we have in
this house! So, we read a chapter at a time and
have the kids take turns answering the questions
at the end of the chapters. Parents get to
throw in their two cents worth on answers if the
kids are stumped but that has not happened much. We love it that learning logic has been so much fun with these books. My girls who are 12 and 13 just love Hans & Nathaniel’s “guy humor.”
We were glad we read Thinking Toolbox second because we are finding it very helpful in
getting our minds geared toward our homeschool
science fair with your helpful ideas on brainstorming and hypotheses!
One other way we’ve used your material is I had asked all my debate students to read The Fallacy Detective over the summer to get ready for our novice debate class. So, thanks again for making such great logic material available to families. It is so helpful!
We’ve been reading through the Fallacy Detective together on the couch. Nathanial and Hans have given me many opportunities to use all my character “voices” to read their dialogue examples. Between their innate humor and my hit’n miss choice of dialect, we get to howling on the couch….
Here’s a rare occurrence when it comes to other subjects, (my kids cheering), “Do another lesson! PLEASE….do another lesson!
You gotta love a book which causes both kids and adults to laugh out loud together.
I have to concur with many here that use it after devotions in the evening. We are two parents that never took any kind of logic and aren’t very good at it so we are all learning together, the kids faster than the parents,I might add. We now find ourselves thinking this way in all our conversations and we have had to stop the kids from commenting on someone’s lack of logic in their presence! Yikes!
We have the older version of Fallacy Detective so now I am curious (and a bit covetous) of seeing the new one.
Thanks for all your scholarly work, it is such a blessing to us.