Teaching Reasoning: Activities and Games for the Classroom

by Laurel Hecker, Julia A. Simms

Teach students essential skills with engaging activities. Explore key reasoning skills from the Common Core and Next Generation Science Standards and strategies for teaching them to students. Then, discover fun, research-based games and activities to reinforce students’ reasoning skills. This practical text provides clear guidance for incorporating these tools into your classroom to prepare students for academic and lifetime success.

577 pages, Kindle Edition

First published February 20, 2015

Reviews

[amycw · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was one of the better books I have come across for teaching logic or reasoning. Most of the activities included were high quality, and I liked how everything was differentiated for elementary, middle school, and high school. They also provided pages and pages of usable samples/examples (if the lesson required students to read a paragraph, they included like 40 sample paragraphs).

On the flip side, the prep for some of the lessons was too time-consuming, especially in regards to cutting out cards and having students put the cards in the right order. I have 35-40 kids per class... multiple classes in a row... I can't spend hours cutting out cards. I also wish the book included some activities for inductive and abductive reasoning; it almost solely focuses on deductive syllogisms.

That being said, I was able to use multiple activities from this book and tweaked some activities into quizzes.