TOS Review - The Critical Thinking Co. - Editor in Chief Level 1

 

Have you ever had a catalog come in the mail to you numerous times and always plan on ordering something, but never quite get to it? Well, that is exactly what happens to me each and every time The Critical Thinking Co. catalog comes to my home. So, when the opportunity arose to review Editor in Chief Level 1, I jumped at the chance.

 

 

 

The Critical Thinking Co. has been around since 1958 with their award winning products. Each product is designed to help students dig deep and think critically as opposed to just memorizing materials for retention. Of course the "think critically" part is intimidating to me because as a child and a youth I don't believe I was ever really taught to think that way. Maybe that is the one thing in the past that held me back from placing an order. Thinking I couldn't understand the material.

 

Our household was chosen to review Editor in Chief Level 1 which is for grades 4 and 5 and came to us as a physical book. This was a perfect fit to try out with my three 5th grade students that I tutor. Editor in Chief Level 1 has 12 sections of lessons that include:

• Content
• Capitalization
• Punctuation
• Spelling Rules
• Nouns and Pronouns
• Adjectives, Adverbs, Articles
• Verbs
• Agreement
• Conjunctions, Prepositions, and Interjections
• Confused Word Pairs/Negative Words
• Homophones and Homographs
• Run-On Sentences and Sentence Fragments

Also included in the workbook are review pages, answer keys, and instructional material for each new topic.

 

Here's How It Works

 

After reviewing the lesson's material with the student there will be four worksheets to apply the learned knowledge. Each worksheet will have multiple errors which the student then searches for and corrects. This mimics the process of editing. Now the student rewrites the passage without the previous errors.

 

Here's How We Used It

 

Each week we tackled a new lesson of information and completed the corresponding worksheets. The girls are here three days a week which equaled three worksheets beings accomplished. This put us finishing the first four lessons in the workbook including a mini-review section. I also created what I call a "cheat sheet folder" for each girl. This includes copies of the lesson material that they can refer back to anytime in the future for help. The only thing we didn't do was rewrite the passages as I have a couple of students that are not fond of writing. The workbook does state that rewriting the passages is optional.

 

In the future I plan on lining up the remaining topics to our current grammar curriculum and use the Editor in Chief worksheets for review. We very much enjoyed this product. One of my students loves all things grammar and she thought the product was fun. Sometimes they worked on their own and other times together to search out all the errors. The best part about Editor in Chief and quite frankly all of The Critical Thinking Co. products is the allowance of making copies for multiple students. This makes your purchase an economical one. I plan on utilizing this product many times in the future and would definitely purchase other products as well.

 

Please go and check out all the wonderful products provided by The Critical Thinking Co.. Many Crew members reviewed products as well from the same company that you may find helpful and you can check those reviews out at TOS Review Crew.

 

 

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