Critical Thinking

Adult Life Skills: Preparing Graduates That Think

September 24, 2019 by Jenna

Have you ever lost sight of the goal in the middle of the monotony of it all? Every day seems full of diagrams, algebraic equations, dates, and classifications. You can’t help but think, “What’s the point?” That’s the question that math students have always wondered about: “When are we ever going to use this?” But Mom, you’re not immune to that way of thinking either. Sometimes you just need to take time to remember what the point is. Yes, by homeschooling your children you’re ensuring that you have the final say about everything they learn. You’re taking the opportunity to disciple them so that they can live out God’s calling in their lives. And that’s a vital part of homeschooling. But do you really need to teach them the quadratic formula? Remember, you’re not just teaching them facts. You’re teaching them critical thinking skills. In other words, you’re teaching adult life skills.

Beyond the Facts

Those skeptical math students have a valid point. The technicalities of academic subjects aren’t all that useful for adult life skills. That complicated mathematical formula won’t help your child balance a checkbook. But what those math students don’t realize is that they’re not just learning facts. As they wrestle with a new concept, they’re also learning how to learn. They’re learning how to stay focused when working through long processes. They’re learning how to solve for missing information.

In the day-to-day minutia of academic studies, the facts aren’t important. What’s important is that your children are using their minds each day and growing. They’re learning to interact with new information, consider its implications, respond to it, make connections, and create and define new information. In other words, they’re learning to think.

Critical Thinking Skills and Adult Life Skills

Much like the math students questioning why they’re learning an obscure concept, many highschoolers are noticing that they can, say, rattle off all the taxonomic ranks of biological classifications, but they can’t apply for a credit card. It will probably come as a surprise to them, but many of the things they’ll need to do in their adult lives aren’t actually that hard to do. Applications for credit cards and other loans can be so easy to do that many of us do them without thinking about the serious implications of buying on credit. But at the end of the day, that’s exactly the kind of thing you want your graduates to be able to think about.

Young adults don’t need special courses on how to pay their bills and apply for loans. Companies have a vested interest in people paying bills and applying for loans, so they make those processes self-explanatory. But young adults do need to be able to consider the implications of missing a payment or having a credit card. Is a credit card really worth it? Is building one’s credit even as important as it seems? Would it be better to always pay for things with cash on hand? These are questions that your children will have to wrestle with and answer as they grow, but they probably don’t have the maturity and life experience needed to consider them now.

Your children can use the same processes they will use as they consider the implications and wisdom of having a credit card to their own future families. Interacting with their spouses and children will involve tons of new information that they will need to learn, respond to, and determine the implications of on a daily basis.

Ready to Answer God’s Call

God has some purpose in store for your children. They may find it today or not discover it until they’re thirty. The best way for you to prepare them for whatever God has for them is to teach them how to think, learn, and grow. There’s a lot you can teach them yourself, but you can’t possibly teach them all the adult life skills they need. There’s a lot they’re going to have to learn by themselves. But if you’ve been preparing them from the beginning, and if you’ve equipped them to learn, then you have equipped them for life.

How to Develop Critical Thinking Skills in Young Children

September 3, 2019 by Megan

Critical thinking skills are essential for success in today’s society. But they’re not something you can cram into your child’s head right before they graduate. The ability to thinking critically has to be developed. And developing it takes a lot of time.

What exactly is critical thinking? Critical thinking, sometimes called higher order thinking skills, or HOTS, includes the ability to make applications, analyze, evaluate, create, and synthesize information. Critical thinkers don’t just know information; they know how to use it. They can solve problems and think for themselves.

So if the development of critical thinking skills is such a crucial part of any homeschool, how can you as a homeschool mom start developing these skills in your young children?

Encourage Imaginative Play

First of all, you can give your young children plenty of unstructured play time. Play is an important part of childhood—it is truly the “work” of children. When kids play, they have opportunities to “try out” different roles and activities. I see this a lot in my home—my youngest daughter is just starting to enjoy pretend play. Last night she pretended to be a restaurant worker, and I was the customer. Her little two-year-old mind had to work through what she needed to fill my order. I ordered tea and salad, but for me to enjoy my “meal,” she needed to bring me a cup, a plate, a pile of pretend lettuce, and a fork.

When my older daughters play, their fantasies are a lot more complex. Sometimes they’re early American settlers trying to survive in the wilderness. Sometimes they’re managing orphanages or teaching in schools. But they’re always solving problems, applying the things that they know to different scenarios and exercising their brains. They aren’t wasting time.

Ask Questions to Encourage Critical Thinking Skills

• Ask a lot of questions.

Another important way you can develop critical thinking skills in your young children is by asking them lots of questions—and not just yes-no questions. Ask them open-ended questions that require thoughtful answers. The BJU Press reading curriculum is full of this type of questioning. You can read about how these questions help build interest and develop critical thinking skills in my article “Make Reading Lessons Interesting with Questions.”

You can use this type of question in everyday conversation too. For example, my oldest daughter is a voracious reader. One evening during dinner, my husband asked her about one of the books she had just finished reading. She immediately began to summarize the plot. But my husband was more interested in the moral tone of the book, so he began asking her questions such as “Why is that character considered good? Did that character do the right thing? How do you know?” Questions like these help her to analyze and evaluate the things that she reads.

• Get them to make predictions.

Second, ask your kids questions to help them make predictions. When my kindergartner learned about dentists and dental health, we decided to do an experiment that was suggested in the BJU Press Focus on Fives teacher edition (vol. 1). I hard-boiled three eggs and soaked them in a dark-colored cola to show what sugary drinks do to your teeth. Before I placed the eggs in the cola, I asked my daughter “What do you think is going to happen to these eggs? Do you think the cola is going to be good for them?” Questions like these will help her develop cause-and-effect reasoning abilities that are necessary for making applications.

• Ask them to compare and contrast.

Finally, ask your kids to compare and contrast things. This past week, I taught my kindergartner about the letter e. She was having difficulty writing the uppercase E and kept writing the numeral 3. So I started asking her questions: “How does an E look like a 3? What’s different about it?” This comparing and contrasting exercise helped her distinguish between the two because it helped her analyze the parts of each one.

Allow Your Kids to Fail (and Help Them Learn from It)

Our kids will never learn to think for themselves if we do all their thinking for them. So give them permission to try new things, and be prepared to let them fail. When I was about eleven, my mother was so sick one night that she let my brother and me make dinner without her supervision. We ruined thirteen potatoes that night learning how not to cook a potato. But we did eventually figure out a way to cook them to everyone’s satisfaction. Sometimes the best way to learn how to do something is to experience what doesn’t work.

Additional Resources

If you’re interested in learning more about the importance of critical thinking and how BJU Press homeschool materials develop critical thinking skills, check out the following articles.

Critical Thinking for Godly Living

May 29, 2018 by Guest Writer

As home educators, we want our children to be able to think for themselves with the Bible as their foundation of thought. Hopefully, we are teaching our children how to use logic, deduction, and reasoning to solve problems in their schoolwork and in serving their neighbors. If we teach them only how to memorize facts and manufacture answers, we are not sufficiently preparing them for college and life as adults.

Biblical Worldview Thinking

But critical thinking must extend beyond our children’s education to their spiritual lives as well. If we teach our kids only how to memorize Bible facts and recite verses, we are not sufficiently preparing them for their lifelong relationship with the Lord. If we think that attending church and participating in programs will provide our children adequate spiritual training, we’re grievously mistaken. It can be a temptation for parents to drill critical thinking into their children’s schooling while doing very little to encourage it in their Christian walk. They miss crucial opportunities to discuss God’s Word and help their children understand and apply it to their lives. If we’re not careful, we can operate on spiritual autopilot and go through the motions of worshiping God without giving it much thought.

Training Them to Think

So how can we teach our children to think critically about spiritual matters? One way is to ask lots of “how” and “why” questions. For instance, let’s say your child is memorizing John 1:29, “Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world.” Ask questions such as, “Who is the Lamb of God? Why is He described as a lamb? How can He take away the sins of the world?” Sunday dinner is a great opportunity to talk about the Scriptures you heard in the sermon. Ask your children what they learned from the message (or the lesson they heard in Sunday school). What was the main point? How could they apply the message to their lives? Was there anything they didn’t understand? Family devotions is another great time to foster children’s ability to think through God’s Word. Take time to discuss and ask thought-provoking questions about the passage you read. Give them time to think it over, and try not to feed them the answers during an awkward silence. They may not get all the answers right, and that’s OK.

They may struggle to put their thoughts into words, and that’s OK too! You’re training them to meditate on God’s Word. Another time to teach critical thinking is when your child sees or hears something that contradicts God’s Word (in the news, on the playground, etc.). Instead of just telling your children, “That’s wrong, we don’t do that,” ask them why it’s wrong and how it dishonors God. See if they can quote a verse that backs up their reasons.

Training Them to Live

If we want to prepare our children for spiritual success, then we must use this crucial developmental phase to teach them critical thinking about His Word.

• • • • •

Jennifer is a pastor’s wife and mom of two young girls and loves being able to homeschool them. During her own twelve years of homeschooling, Jennifer developed a passion for reading and writing. She earned a bachelor’s degree in creative writing and relishes writing during her free time.

Why History Seems Boring and How to Make It Fascinating

October 5, 2017 by Ben

It’s not unusual for children to find history boring. But that wasn’t the case with me. I’ve been a history nerd ever since my dad took me on a homeschool field trip to a World War II aircraft carrier. But I understand that not everyone shares my enthusiasm for studying the past. Does your child get bored with history?

There are plenty of reasons some children (and adults!) think history is uninteresting. Here are just two of them—and my suggestion for how to fix the problem.

• Just the (Boring) Facts

Sometimes studying history feels like the mindless memorization of unrelated dates and names. As they read historical narratives, kids may get the sense that dates pop up without warning, sometimes causing them to wonder why particular events have dates associated with them and others don’t.

And then there are the names. Certain people have some action or achievement associated with their names that we exhort our children to remember. Take the Age of Enlightenment as an example. There are so many philosophers and so many scientists—each with a discovery or book title attached to his name. Trying to keep track of it all can feel overwhelming.

• Not Relevant (to Me)

Not only do the dates and names feel overwhelming, focusing on facts makes it difficult for your child to see what all this has to do with him personally. He’s hearing about a bunch of dead people who haven’t done a thing for centuries. And when is anybody ever going to use the fact that 1,285 years ago this month Charles Martel defeated the Moors in the Battle of Tours? It just doesn’t seem to make any difference in our day-to-day lives.

Big-Picture Approach

Those are two common complaints, but what can we do to help our children see the significance and relevance of people and events from the past? We can turn “boring” history into a fascinating study by using questions to focus our children’s attention on the big picture. An important aspect of this is teaching history as a narrative in chronological order.

And here are a couple of effective questioning strategies you can use to help your children see the big picture of the historical narrative they’re reading. This involves going beyond the regular surface-level questions like “When did . . . ?” and “Who wrote . . .?” Big-picture questions enable students to synthesize historical data into an overarching view of the past.

• Before-and-After Reading Questions

These questions are most effective when given to children as preparation before they read something and as follow-up afterwards. Before children wade into material chronicling a series of bureaucratic changes, scientific advancements, or philosophic treatises, they need to know what they’re looking for. Guiding questions like the ones below from World Studies (page 152) can help. Having a purpose in their reading will lead children to see the bigger picture.

• Critical Thinking Questions

A second type of big-picture question can also help your children refocus on the important ideas after reading through the details, like this one from Heritage Studies 4 (page 171).

Such questions generalize history, making it more relevant. They help your children move from superficially recalling details to thinking critically because they have to synthesize the details in order to create a generalization. All those pesky details are important, but if children don’t develop critical thinking skills, they won’t see the significance.

By understanding chronological order and generalizations of historical events, students can make appropriate analogies to things that are happening today. While no past event is a perfect match for a current event, there’s often significant overlap. The differences mean we cannot use the past to predict the future, but we can use the past to give us moral clarity about the present. A student with a biblical worldview and an understanding of historical context will be better able to navigate the complexities of current events. Ultimately, those connections to worldview and the present will make history interesting to your child.

Use effective questions in history so your children will learn to value history as they see its connection to the present.

Are You Asking the Right Questions?

June 7, 2016 by Jenna

Much of your child’s success in learning depends on the questions you ask him and how you ask them. Research shows undisputed benefits from asking questions to develop reading comprehension. These questions help children of all ages put what they’re learning into a context that they can discuss, and those who answer comprehension questions learn more subject matter than their peers who do not. Asking your child questions also helps him discover his own ideas. It also gives him an opportunity to explore his creativity and to sharpen critical-thinking skills.

But like most homeschooling parents, you already know the need to ask questions to ensure that your child is learning. In order to teach effectively, you also need to know that you’re asking the right kind of questions. Consider these steps to improving your questioning method.

1. Develop your child’s thinking skills by asking questions that go beyond content.

Use questions that require comparing, evaluating, and discerning. (Why? What if? What is the evidence? What are the alternatives? What are the implications? What do you think is right?)

2. Give your child time to answer.

Don’t expect an immediate response. Five or six seconds of silence is not much time to allow for a well-developed response.
Be willing to accept an unconventional answer. Don’t dismiss an answer simply because it didn’t use the terms in the way that you wanted. Your child may be thinking along the right lines but maybe unable to express the answer in the correct terms. Take the time to help your child restate his answer.

3. Help your child think toward the right answers.

If your child doesn’t understand the question or answers incorrectly, ask simpler questions that help build up to the question you asked initially. If your child has trouble explaining why a sentence is grammatically incorrect, ask about the functions of the words in the sentence (which word is the verb? Is it transitive or intransitive? If it’s transitive, doesn’t it require a direct object? Is there a direct object?).
Demonstrate for your child how you arrive at conclusions by walking him through your own questioning process (how you decided to make a difficult purchase or what leads you to endorse a particular political candidate).

If you help your child by demonstrating good questioning practices, he will not only learn course content but also learn how to ask questions in order to arrive at the answers for themselves. And isn’t that the whole point?

For more insights on questions, consider the discussion sections in our BJU Press curriculum Teacher’s Editions.