Have you seen Isaac Watts’ logic book? Watts is mostly known for his hymns but he also wrote Logic, or The Right Use of Reason in the Inquiry After Truth With a Variety of Rules to Guard Against Error in the Affairs of Religion and Human Life, as well as in the Sciences. Logic was first published in 1724 and at that time considered a book for beginners. It was quite popular, going through twenty editions, and became the standard text on logic at Oxford (used there for over 100 years), Cambridge, Harvard and Yale.
Today’s student would find Logic difficult, due to its antiquated language and sentence structure, but author Daniel Valles has produced a curriculum which makes it usable again.
Taken from the Art of Logic web site:
Based on Isaac Watts’ book, Logic, the Logic Seminar provides instruction in clear thinking from a Christian perspective on how to properly exercise our senses to discern between good and evil. If we cannot think clearly, we will not interpret God’s Word clearly either. Set in 1776, this 3-DVD Set contains almost four hours of video and over forty short lessons enriched with an engaging colonial theme and cinematic illustrations. The entire curriculum includes a Student Workbook, Teacher Guide and Tests & Quiz Pack. Besides helping the students learn the fundamentals behind their thinking, they are largely taught what makes good thinking, how to judge rightly, and to be aware of what can affect or influence their thinking. Visit the website to preview all of the lessons and learn more about this unique approach to this vital subject of our thinking!
Now for the contest!!
In the comments below describe an activity, game, or exercise which will encourage good thinking skills.
The winner will receive a complete Logic Seminar Combo (DVD set, Student Workbook, Teacher Guide, and Test & Quiz Pack).
We’ll pick a winner in a few days.
My children do not have to use paper to solve math problems, so we play a game in which we can easily solve math problems mentally. They come up with some unique ways to do mental computations. Of course, they think they are avoiding work by doing this.
We LOVE playing games together as a family. I can share many games that encourage thinking skills, however, it sounds as if you are looking for an original idea. I am thinking that maybe since I don’t have an original idea, you would be putting this prize curriculum to wonderful use, by placing it in our hands to use with our 5 children in our homeschool! Thanks for this awesome opportunity, and for considering our family! Many Blessings!
Chronological snobbery aside, I have found that older can be better when it comes to critical thinking/math exercises. Recently I decided to pull out my set of Ray’s Arithmetic to supplement my son’s math work with some Ray’s mental math exercises. He thinks it so much fun. He loves it and begs for “one more, one more.” He’s 7 and is learning his times tables, so the ones I choose are the combination story problems requiring multiplication, addition, and subtraction, all 3, to solve one problem. I can see his wheels turning. If necessary, we use our Math-U-See manipulative blocks and/or the white board to help solve the problems. Some of the wording is so antiquated that I change it to make the stories more modern and relevant. I’ll include my son in the story, his friends, his toys, etc. It’s very engaging. Thanks for the opportunity! Teresa
well I haven’t taught logic but an activity we have always done to encourage thinking & perceiving God’s truth in the world around us is to identify issues we see in a film or read in a movie with a scripture..since I often tried to read a Proverb a day with the children we would read and look for where we recently saw that truth evidenced in something we saw or read…sorry for typos writing quickly, poor typing skills and perhaps too much Twitter 🙂
With my Littles I play a lot of order games (what order did these things happen in), this-is-to-as-that-is-to games, and they LOVE sudoku type logic games. I bought a GREAT little game for my 4 year old last year called ZOOLOGIC… everyone plays it. It uses pets and their “treats” as tools to get the kids to think though the most logical layout. It goes from simple to very challenging (keeps Dad and Mom working hard!). We’ve also had the Bigs do the Fallacy Detective book, and have fun catching logic mistakes in all kinds of areas (speaking to customer service departments on speaker is GREAT for a whole lesson.. sometimes it’s shocking how ILlogical they can be! LOL!).
My oldest daughter has dysgraphia, and so we (everyone)do a lot of right/left brain physical activities to encourage good neuropathways… like marching, reciting while doing crawling/creeping races across the famiy room floor, etc. I believe I can see a difference in my Littles (as compared the the Big’s thinking skills at the same age).
Oh, and for general brain health, we’re sure to take our daily high quality fish oil supplements! LOL! No use trying to use a tool that is damaged and worn before it’s time, right?
BLESSINGS!
Shannon
Well, since we’ve been going through Fallacy Detective lately, one “game” we play is to point out the fallacies present in the advertisements that my kids view or hear. We don’t watch regular television at all, but we do see magazine ads, billboards, and the ads at the beginning of DVDs. It’s fun to see what my kids will come up with, and the discussion often involves more than just the fallacy part. What assumptions are being made? Does the thing being advertised really address the need that has been featured? Are they implying other benefits, like lots of friends, if you use their product? Is that a reasonable conclusion?
Anyway — we would LOVE to win this set, as my oldest is ready to be taking a logic course, and I just don’t have the money to purchase anything right now. This looks wonderful.
I game that I enjoy, but don’t have any name for is just a simple one-word word association game. Each person says one word that plays off of the previous word, but they can bridge this into a totally different context. For example: first word is Paris, next word is bicycle (Tour de France), next word is yellow (winner wears the color yellow), next word is submarine (i.e. the Beatles’ song), etc. I always enjoyed trying to weave the the words through a winding map of subjects, but try to bring it back to the original word to end the game.
We love playing Blokus and Sequence for kids.
And we love having the children sort things into muffin tins … by color, shape, size, whatever ways I can think of 😉
We don’t have any separate activities for thinking skills per se. I constantly ask my children to evaluate what they see and hear. It can be the ad on a box of cereal or a political pundit on the radio. I don’t want my kids to tell me what I’ve taught them I want them to defend their position on their own. I also ask them to critically evaluate things they technically agree with, like when someone argues for creation using a bad argument. I ask the kids to find the bad argument and then ask them to think about how to make it better. We are just now starting “The Fallacy Detective” and my 2 older boys are so very excited. They do not feel the lessons are “real” work. Thanks.
We enjoy making up red herrings and pointing it out to each other, reading newslines and finding fallacies when people take sides. These are some of our games.
During family worship every night and every other day when we go through the Who Is God? book we ask them “tricky questions”. For example, our 5 yo knows the answer to “What is the Trinity?” but when we ask him “What does the Father, Son and Holy Spirit make up?” he always stumbles! I never realized how important it is to quiz them on the reverse of what they learn until this.
I teach our children (6 and under) a basic children’s catechism involving simple questions and answers that teach doctrinal truths from God’s Word. During our daily Bible reading, as we encounter the different doctrines throughout the breath of Scripture, I’ll ask them the catechism questions and use their memorized answers to unfold the Scripture we are reading. I can see their little minds making connections and it is a beautiful sight!
We do a lot of mental math and Sudoku. Our younger children like when I make up a Sudoku game for them using colors or shapes.
We play alot of card games like Uno and SkipBo. We also like to play memory using different types of cards like CandyLand cards or Old Maid or Go Fish. And in our home, jigsaw puzzles rule.
Game playing is great for critical thinking and logic skills. Before playing a game the kid in charge had to read the directions and teach us the game. She is the go to person for the game to check the rules when their is a dispute. It is fun to let them take a game that everyone already knows how to play, and let them create new rules and new ways to play. This is challenging and fun!
My 5 are all in the still under 10 category and are just starting to blossom in their thinking skills. The oldest three love jokes and kill us with knock, knock jokes most of which are totally illogical, but it has gotten them to thinking. My six year old daughter (7 on Monday) came up with an original joke tonight. She had heard that a cat’s favorite color was purrrrple. She asked “What is a dog’s favorite color?” Brow-ow-own (Said while howling like a dog) Guess humor is just good all the way around!
We try to always look at things from a Christian perspective, especially when the children are watching DVD’s, reading books, listening or reading something in the media (current affairs, newspaper articles). We ask them,”what does the Bible teach us on this issue?” or, quoting scripture to show the wisdom or foolishness of what they observed. We have read few lessons of The Thinking Toolbox which made them (and me ) aware of the fallacies we encounter around us.
We have begun a once a day routine called “think it through”. My kids are 8 & 9 and I am enstilling the idea that without wisdom a mans ways become foolish so let’s “think it through”. I give a scenario like… “what would be your instant response if I told you to go clean that mirror with some paper towels & Windex?” (the mirror is very heavy in a huge weighted frame and hangs above my husbands guitar equipment). My kids then must describe their instant 1st thought and it consequences. Their first idea would be to run get the cleaning supplies and jump up on dad’s amplifier and began spritzing the mirror. But what would logic and wisdom say? Herein the begun to work out the kinks of what obvious mishaps could ensue. It is so helpful as my precious gifted daughter struggles to discover common sense.
I so would live to introduce this curriculum to encourage her to make lifelong wise logical choices. Thanks!
My youngest is 13, so we encourage analyzing messages through active listening, & not just passively allowing information to infiltrate our brains.
when hearing or seeing an advertisement we try to find logical fallacies.
Debate! Of course, first comes Building Thinkings skills in the grammar (st)ages, then The Thinking Toolbox and The Fallacy Detectvive, and onward to more formal study of traditional and material logic. And that is good prep for formal debate! In one recent debate round, I listed to my son as he criticized the negative team for “affirming the consequent,” exhibiting his full fledged entry into the rhetoric (st)age. Logic is vital, not only for debate, but for real life situations. My oldest, a freshman in college, has benefitted by his homeschool logic education. Thanks for your ministry, from long ago, that set us on the right path. 🙂
I and my family make movies as a business and for fun. The whole process means a lot of brain work! We write our own scripts, make our own costumes, film, edit, market, and sell our films. This encourages every member of the family to think and think HARD! As we put ourselves into the lives of the people we create we must employ logic so as to make our film believable.
Jessica
We have different games for our children. Block by Block, Square by Square,(looking at pictures and having to build the same picture, in 3D and 2D), and games called Minds Eye, Sequence, Mancalla, and Blokus are all wonderful to develop good thinking and strategy skills. Also building with legos and building on computer animated design programs such as Sketch Up. Sketch Up is a free CAD program that Google has on the internet with upgrades.
My husband teaches them with a certain trick that he does by placing a toothpick in the corner seem of a hand towel (secretly) and then has the child put another toothpick in the center of the towel, folds it in half and has the child break the toothpick (in the seam) and then opens the towel to see the whole toothpick that they placed in the towel. This always amazes them and they have to figure out how that can be. They know that they broke the toothpick, but it is still whole. They come to the logical conclusion that there must be another toothpick.
The Fallacy detective, and The Thinking Toolbox are really good books to encourage thinking skills as well.
We have always talked with them about situations that arise in our lives where there is illogical decisions being made and let them try to figure out the logical way, with the Bible as our foundation.
We pray for discernment and wisdom and have taught our children to do the same. God gives clear thinking!
We enjoy playing brain tickler type of questions.
I usually post a tickler question where everyone can read it and I leave it up for a few days to give everyone a chance to solve it. After that I ask the kids to give their answers and we find out who was able to solve the brain tickler. Here’s an example: If one child has 6 2/3 sand piles and another has 3 1/3, and you combine them, how many sand piles do you have?
At first it would seem that a math equation needs to be done to solve the riddle, but the answer does not involve adding mixed numbers at all.
The answer is “One.” If they are all combined, there is just one sand pile.
Brain tickler questions cause the kids to think in different ways.
I’m a police officer so consequences are an expected result of doing my job. I discuss with my 9 year old son the natural consequences that result from making every decision. When we drive we talk about the things we see and “what would happen if.” We work at a homeless shelter once a month and discuss the “feed a man a fish, teach a man to fish” proverb. With my younger girls we talk about making poor decisions and having the courage to do the right thing. The best way for their good decisions to to know and understand the world instead of relying on someone else’s ability to reason. My 9 month old is learning the logic of holding onto the furniture and knowing what will happen when he lets go….he’s still learning that one.
One of my favorite games is great for a group of teens or older. One person is labeled the “psychiatrist” and waits outside while the rest of the game is explained to the group. Sitting in a circle, each person must answer any question the “psychiatrist” asks as though he were the person on his right. If he answers incorrectly, the person on the right says “psychiatrist” and everyone except the designated psychiatrist gets up and changes seats. For example, if the psych asks Sue how many brothers she has, she must consider how many brothers Jane on her right has. If Sue doesn’t know, and makes an incorrect guess, Jane must holler “Psychiatrist!” and everyone rearranges themselves. If Sue knows that Jane has two brothers, and answers two, then nothing changes. You may encourage the psych to ask questions to which he thinks he knows the answers. The goal is for the psychiatrist to discover that everyone “suffers from believing they are the person on their right.”
Great fun, especially in a group where everyone already knows each other. I find young adults figure it out faster than older adults.
We’d love to learn more about logic in this house!
Our favorite thinking game, Squabble, uses Scrabble letter tiles. It’s even more fun using two sets of tiles. To start the game, all the tiles are turned upside down in the center. Each player turns over one tile at a time. Whenever a player sees a word with at least three letters that can be formed, he yells out that word, takes the tiles, and places the word in front of himself. When a player makes a word, he goes next in turning over the next tile. As more tiles are turned over, new words may be formed or letters may be added to an existing word to form a new word. If a player sees another word that can be formed with an opponents word, he yells out that word and takes it from the first player and places it in front of himself. Words may also be taken from an opponent with saying another word that can be formed with the same letters. For example, if I have the word “rat” someone could take it from me by yelling out “tar” and “art.” New words may NOT be formed by adding a prefix, suffix, or plural unless the word is a completely new word. For example, if I have the word wine, I could not add an ‘s’ to makes wines, but I could make the word swine. If the word ‘swine’ was the original word, I could say ‘wines’ because I was not making a plural of ‘wine.” This is a great word building game. If you have ‘word whizzes’ playing, it becomes VERY fast paced and exciting.When all the tiles are used, the game ends and score is counted using the Scrabble number values on the tiles. Once our pastor and his wife were playing with us and at the end of the game, our pastor had built two words by rearranging and adding one/few letters at a time. The two words he ended up with at the end of the game were ‘regeneration’ and ‘damnation!’We got a good laugh out of that game. But I must say, my mathematical statistician husband won’t play this game with me:)
My kids are 5 and 6, so when they ask questions (as they are wont to do), I often turn them around and ask them what THEY think the answer is. With Socratic-style questioning, they can often think their way through things to get (close to) an answer.
Example: (The kid is hitting a balloon up and down around the room, then when it gets hit high, it sticks to the ceiling instead of coming down)
“Mom, why is that balloon sticking to the ceiling?”
“I don’t know, why do you think it is?”
“I don’t know, mom.”
“Well, did you put some glue one it?”
“No, we were just playing with it.”
“Oh, show me what you were doing.” (demonstration of hitting the balloon up)
“Hmmm…..did it get on your head?”
“Sure.”
“Well, what happens when you rub a balloon in your hair?”
“It gets all static-y. Look mom, (as he tries again with another balloon), it’s making my hair all crazy!”
“Well, do you think the balloon could stick in your hair?” (tries it)
“Hey mom! It’s stuck on my head!”
“Well….do you think that could have anything to do with how it sticks on the ceiling?”
“Oh, yeah! Maybe the static makes it stay up there!” (What a brilliant child!)
Sure it takes a lot more time than just saying “static electricity,” but really, I think the kid has a MUCH clearer idea of what static electricity is and what that has to do with the balloon sticking to the ceiling if he puzzles his way through with a few well-directed questions from mom (as well as some experimenting).
Of course, I don’t do this all the time, but every day there are episodes like this around the house. I say, don’t tell your kids all the answers. Teach them how to think their way through things.
One thing we’ve been doing to improve our listening/critical thinking skills is to watch current events and analyze them together. For example, our family DVR’d the State of the Union Address a few weeks ago. The next day we sat down as a family and watched the speech. Afterwards, we watched it again while pausing it to discuss things that were up for debate. We sought out instances that didn’t line up with our worldview and dicussed why we think differently about certain issues. We continued to pause the speech and discuss statements and questions we could ask about what the President was or wasn’t saying. It always is a great time of learning when we do this. We try to DVR MANY important addresses and speeches each month and then choose a few to dissect and analyze and create arguments for or against them as a family. We have 5 children but only our 6th, 3rd, and 1st grader really can paricipate in the discussions. I am excited to see how the ‘speech’ sessions continue as the children get older!
Watch the news with The Fallacy Detective in hand!
Logic Puzzles are great for building skills to discern small differences and how they can effect each other. There are a few timed online for improving speed on processing, but for the younger ones you can do them over time as a family.
We play the 24 game: 4 numbers that must be added, subtracted, multiplied and/or divided to come up with 24. Some are very challenging, and all improve both math and general thinking skills.
Instead of simply presenting our children with information, we often leave them to decipher solutions themselves. Since our children range from toddler to teen, this can take many forms. It can be as simple as letting them figure out how to do a real life math problem or as complicated as dissecting the culture and religious views of ancient Egypt and analyzing them according to Biblical truths.
We also cut out “mind benders” from newspapers and magazines and place them in a “Brain Builders and Boredom Busters” pocket I made out of construction paper and attached to the refrigerator. It contains anything from Sudoku to word challenges and more.
We play a lot of word games like piggy back and do riddles.
My husband carries logic over into the musical world. While I teach them to play according to what is printed on the page, he breaks it down into theory and shows them the logic and sequence behind the music. They can then take any song and play it on piano or guitar or as a duet.
Most effective, however, is the everyday conversations and discussions we have about the fallacy behind certain things we encounter or behind arguments we ourselve are making. It’s great to watch them pointing these things out themselves, and gives us hope that we aren’t raising mindless lemmings incapable of going against the flow.
Ironically, my husband I met and fell in love during college where we were in choir and logic together. We both aced logic, although my score was one point higher than his. I remind him of that now and then, but only when all the logical arguments don’t win him over to my side. 😉
Great contest with an even more awesome prize!
My favorite way to encourage critical thinking is to subject my children to the complete opposite belief than they hold and force them to answer their points. For example, I’ll find a well written editorial that supports government education or is anti-homeschooling and ask them how to rebut their claims.
My favorite way to introduce a fallacy came when I was teaching a homeschool coop class on logical fallacies. The children were just at the beginning of their development from concrete to abstract thinking and couldn’t quite grasp the idea of a fallacy. So I got a box of TimBits from Tim Horton’s and a box of Donut Holes from Dunkin’ Donuts and set up a mock debate as to which was better. In the beginning they were coming up with all the “logical reasons” why one was better than the other. But then I told them think like a commercial and “stretch the truth” but make it so believable that people will be persuaded to think your way. They started coming up with all sorts of reason and with an “a ha” moment understood what a fallacy was and why it is so effective.
We play Blockus! It is great for analysis and logic. We also do lots of memory games.
Besides giving my daughter various puzzle books, she sees her mom and dad doing puzzle books and puzzles in the paper, esp. sudoku.
Games we play include chess, Othello, Clue, Battleship, and Risk.
Our kids are still fairly young (oldest is 1st grade) but we have a couple of things we do.
1) We play the “Is it a good deal” game at the store. Not only is there the “is it cheaper to buy 2 avocados or 20 pounds”, but also the aspect of, “is it really a good deal if we wouldn’t eat 20 pounds?”
2) We also try to build the kids’ awareness of their surroundings by playing the “notice” game. Basically, while driving, whoever can notice something that nobody else notices gets a point.
We enjoy playing mental math games. We take turns answering quickly.
We enjoy chess and blokus! Scrabble is always fun too!!!! In the car we give each other words to spell which is pretty entertaining!!
cooking always encourages good thinking skills- especially if you don’t give the kids a recipe, but require them to bake using their knowledge of how baking powder, flour, salt, yeast and other basic baking ingredients work together in harmony, or don’t! 😉
The children and I make up thinking games and have fun with them. We like to do oral games. We also like to think up new topic ideas to discuss. So enjoy website. Thank you.
One very effective way to build thinking skills is to engage in friendly debate. Persons involved will be forced to examine their position and study the viewpoint of the person on the opposite end of the spectrum. I have found that this is one of the best ways for me to expand my brain and practice thinking logically and truly study multiple facets of an issue. 🙂
I realize this is not a very elevated answer, but I use informercials as a teaching tool. From the “would ordinarily retail at” $$$ (Yeah? Says who?) to the absurdities of before and after pictures that do not show a person’s face, infomercials are just rife with opportunities to think about what you’re being sold. They seem to be increasingly acute at picking up on the propaganda.
We have been enjoying Scrabble of late and are really getting creative with our words. Up to now we’ve been enjoying Boggle and the new electronic Monopoly game. One game that has been great is one of the cooking games for the DS, our 12 yr. old is finding recipes he wants to prepare, following the directions and making things I’ve never even made before and I’ve been cooking for a good 40 + years. He’s being able to use his Math skills as well as timing his completed meal with all things being ready at the same time. I’m really proud of him for pursuing this on his own. He’s the one who is really getting into Scrabble, too.
We play lots of games that encourage/require thinking skills. Examples are chess, Blokus, Clue, MindTrap, Visual Brain Storms, etc.
We also teach our kids apologetics. They learn how to logically defend their faith. My husband and I regularly discuss with our kids the sermons we hear, the news, the books we read, the songs we sing, the movies we watch, etc. We ask them questions and help them to think things through. We train them to always compare everything to the Scriptures like the Bereans. We are thankful that they have great discernment; since they have been so familiar with the Truth, they immediately recognize false teaching when they hear/see one.
Since our son is only 3 we have not delved into logic too deeply yet but we have been developing basic math skills. At snack time we may give him 5 almonds and then tell him to eat one. Then we ask, “If you have 5 and take away one how many do you have left?” Similarly will give him 2 toy cars and then give him 2 more and ask how many he has, “Two cars plus two cars is…” This way we develope the thinking skills for mathematics so he has these tools for later stages of learning.
I am sure enjoying reading all of these tips here! I don’t even own a copy of The Fallacy Detective yet!
I ask my children who,what, where, how and and why questions as appropriate.We then proceed to take apart the argument or propaganda being presented.An example would be, “Mom, why are middle eastern men always portrayed as terrorists?’
“I don’t know,what do you think?”
“I think they want us to believe they’re all bad so nobody questions the war?”
“How would it be different if more people questioned it?”
We like to turn character moments into thinking skills. Example:
Child: That’s not fair!
Parent: That’s true. Life’s not fair.
Child: It’s still not fair.
Parent: It’s not fair that I have to do laundry, make dinner, teach homeschool, work, etc. and you do not. That’s not fair either. Give me 3 examples of life not being fair.
Child: It’s not fair when Daddy takes you out to dinner and I stay home. It’s not fair that I have to shovel snow and my sister doesn’t. It’s not fair that I have to go bed early and you don’t.
Parent: Good. Now tell me in scripture where God said it was going to be fair. Please show me where He said it would be even-steven.
Child: Hmmmm. He didn’t.
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During breakfast, we start our day with world news. We discuss both sides of the issues presented. We finish every discussion by asking what we think the Lord’s answer/resolution to that would be. The children walk away seeing that everyone has a point of view, opinion, or an agenda; but everything needs weighed against the scriptures for truth.
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We resolve arguments quickly by wagering a backrub. The “correct” answer must be found online or in a book, etc. The loser must pay the winner with a backrub.
I often give my children “life” scenarios. Then when they answer to the scenario correctly I change a few of the details that will change their answer. Seems simple but I have found that some adults don’t know how to change with life scenarios and changes thrown at them!
We enjoyed playing Bricks. It challenges your thinking by placing five bricks in the correct order to get the right shape. Since we started playing the process has become easier to view the placing of each brick as the level of difficulty increases. I thank God for giving us the capacity to think and memorize.