The Critical Thinking Company is familiar to many homeschoolers. I’d heard of them and received their catalog, but we had not used any of their materials. I was curious, as the catalog is colorful and tempting, especially for my son who loves logic and mathematics puzzles. As part of the Crew, we received Language Smarts level C (2nd grade) for this review.
The book covers a range of language arts concepts and skills, from phonics to the writing process. Grammar, punctuation, and mechanics are also included. Each concept is taught or reviewed by a variety of activities including word scrambles, fill in the blanks, logic puzzles, and comprehension exercises. The first section contains simple logic puzzles applied to language arts, with a note at the bottom of each page referring you to other products by Critical Thinking that contain the same type of problems and puzzles.
My daughter (7yo/2nd grade) used this book for daily work for the past 6 weeks. She was excited to have a review item all to herself and jumped in enthusiastically. This enthusiasm continued as long as she could find pages with something she already knew how to do. As she’s moved through the book, she’s had a harder time working completely independently, so we’ve worked together on it, primarily finding pages that reinforce the concepts we’ve been learning in First Language Lessons.
The pages are colorful, printed on high gloss paper. My daughter had to use pen as pencil did not work well on the thick paper. A black and white version is also available. The quantity of exercises on each page are not overwhelming, and we usually complete two or three pages each day. The book has 314 pages. Samples of this book are available here.
What we thought: For someone who loves workbooks, my daughter found most of the exercises easy and fun. She was frustrated by the lack of instructions and examples on some pages. Because this is a workbook, they have to provide a range of activities for the second grade level, for example: identifying short and long vowels, something that my daughter had down at least a year ago. She was bored by those pages (about 10 in the early sections of the book).
I did not like the lack of explanation, as she often would read the instructions and apply the example incorrectly. There wasn’t enough instruction in the principles/concept behind the exercise. We don’t use a lot of workbooks except for math. She did really well with the vowel/diphthong/digraphs pages, but I think that is as much to do with the Latin studies she’s been doing with Daddy as the instruction in the book. Her favorite part was the rhymes and riddles section.
A downloadable answer key for the book is available on the website.
We won’t be using this much anymore, now that the review period is done. I prefer to keep our language studies as linked to our other studies and in real-life situations as possible, using dictation, copywork, and narration rather than workbooks. They just don’t “work” for us.
Cost: $39.99
Disclaimer: We received a complimentary copy of this book for the purpose of review. I did not receive any other compensation for this review. The opinions expressed are mine, based on our family’s experience with the product.
