Opening Minds: A Parents’ Guide to Teaching for Thinking at Home

During an unprecedented time, as many more children experience home-based schooling, they and their parents face new educational challenges on top of emotional turmoil, and parents have taken on additional roles. Learning to think intelligently necessitates both experience and further practice. Children who function well on low-level cognition are not always able to succeed at higher-level functioning tasks, and in order to grow they must have opportunities for thinking at all levels. The parent’s role is to choose activities that match the development level and interests of their child. Divided into chapters by level, the book is full of ideas for incorporating observing, comparing, classifying, imagining, hypothesizing, and other advanced thinking skills. Sample activities for elementary students include finding similarities and differences between a sea turtle and a fish; creating a hypothesis about how spiders create webs and then testing it; and making a visual model of the circulatory system.