Thinking Skills & Key Concepts is a new, standards-based series from the authors of our widely acclaimed Building Thinking Skills® series.

It is a research-based instructional program that teaches:
- Improving young 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
- Having students complete 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

Observation Skills
Observation lessons involve concrete examples using detailed photographs which can be supplemented with picture books to develop observation skills. The student book provides pencil and paper exercises, but students clarify their thinking and learning by peer and class discussion.

Academic Vocabulary Development
The program builds academic vocabulary and mental models of important concepts. Students describe, compare and contrast, and classify geometric shapes, family members, occupations, animals, food, vehicles, and buildings. In Grade 1 exercises also include living and non-living things, plants and animals, and land forms and bodies of water.

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 Things – 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
- Analogies – naming the kind of analogy or completing the analogy (first grade only)

Mental Models
Mental Models outline the characteristics needed to describe or define a concept. The first grade book teaches the significant characteristics of the concepts outlined in these mental models and explores each concept in great depth.

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
The student book can be used with a free, downloadable, answer key PDF (Contact us at CHER for availability) or with a detailed Teacher’s Manual which can be purchased separately. The separate 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.