Critical Thinking Press Review

If you visit Household Cents frequently, you probably know that I do an occasional homeschool review for Timberdoodle. We were recently contacted by them to review three different workbooks from Critical Thinking Press, one for each of my school-aged kiddos.


We received Beginning Word Roots for my 10 year old, Building Thinking Skills for my 7 year old and Mathematical Reasoning for my 4 year old.

Here is my oldest working in Word Roots.  I have been pleasantly surprised by this book and my daughter loves it.  It teaches the Latin and Greek meanings of prefixes, root words and suffixes on a 3rd - 4th grade level.  My daughter has been having a lot of "light bulb" moments as she works through Word Roots.  One such moment was when she learned that "astro" means "star, heavens" and "naut" means "sailor, ship".  She thought about it for a few seconds, looked up at me with a huge grin and said, "Wow Mom!  That means that the word 'astronaut' means 'star sailor'!  Cool!"

This one I will definitely use for my other children when they get this age.

Moving right along, here is my 2nd grader working on his Building Thinking Skills book.  So far, I have enjoyed this book because it points out (to me) some of my son's strong points and weak points.  He likes it because it covers lots of different subjects all in one workbook (logical thinking, classifications, spatial awareness, vocabulary, geometry concepts, writing.....on and on it goes).

I will certainly use parts of this one for younger kiddos when they get older.

And here is my 4 year old who is just happy to be like the big kids and have her own school work.  Her book, Mathematical Reasoning Beginning 2 is a great starting point for math for preschoolers.  It covers a lot of beginning basics such as counting, colors, shapes and then moves on to patterns, left and right, number lines, etc.

I'm not sure if I would buy this one for my younger son when he gets this age.  Now that I've been homeschooling for over six years, I can do a lot of this stuff with my preschoolers without the help of a workbook.  I would have loved having it for my oldest when she was in preschool and I was a newbie homeschooler, though.

One thing that I really like about the Critical Thinking Press books is their copyright.  The individual purchaser has the license to reproduce any of the pages for use within their home or classroom.  So, I could purchase one workbook and make copies as I need them for each child.  That can cut the cost significantly!


Legal Disclosure:
As a member of Timberdoodle's Blogger Review Team I received a free copy of these books in exchange for a frank and unbiased review.