This colorful, engaging 272-page book develops critical thinking skills necessary for success in reading, writing, math, science, social studies, and standardized tests in Grades K-1. It uses a series of lessons with math manipulatives and language integration techniques to teach thinking skills. This program is designed to:-Improve young children's observation and description skills-Stimulate vocabulary development-Clarify thinking processes that underlie content learning (observing, describing/defining, identifying similarities and differences, sequencing, classifying, and recognizing analogy)-Improve students' conceptualization of mathematics, social studies and science concepts taught in the primary gradesThe five cognitive skills developed in this series (describing, finding similarities and differences, sequencing, classifying, and forming analogies) were selected because of their prevalence in academic disciplines and their frequency in objective tests. Since improved school performance is an important goal of thinking skills instruction, many variations of each of these thinking skills are promoted in the activities.Thinking skills are sequenced in the order in which a child develops intellectually. A child first learns to observe and describe objects, to recognize the characteristics of an object, and then to distinguish similarities and differences between the objects. Describing, comparing, and contrasting skills are necessary to a child's ability to put things in order, to group items by class, and to think analogically.