I just put in my order from Critical Thinking for our next year of homeschooling. We will finish up this year in the next few months and so I closed my eyes as I ordered tons of stuff for next year and then pretended to not look at the shipping costs to get this stuff all the way to China.
One of my new favorite companies is Critical Thinking. I used them last year for our logic practice. One of our family's top priorities in homeschooling is logic and analytical thinking. This curriculum has tons of logic puzzles (like those fun ones where it says "If Suzy is sitting next to Frank and Frank is sitting at the end of the row...) math reasoning, ethical dilemmas, red herring stories and tons of hands on puzzles to solve. My kids devoured these books. I had to slow them down to one a day because they were flying through the books. I just recently ordered some of their software.
Teaching our kids how to look at a problem from many different angles is so important. We don't want to raise kids who look at a situation and throw their hands up in despair. In Chinese, we often hear 没办法 "there is just no way," and we want to raise kids that say 怎么办 "let's find a way."
Even in the Kindergarten curriculum, there are logic puzzles that have the kids building structures and trying to find out the missing pieces. Or, taking shapes then turn that shape a different way to see how the child can manipulate objects. Our kids really do love these things. I use them as a supplement and as activities when I am working with another child.
