The Thinking Toolbox or The Fallacy Detective......

[ChocolatePrincess]

which do I buy 1st?

[Wildiris]

Fallacy Detective is 1st and then Thinking Tool Box.


Wildiris

[Beth in Central TX]

I don't think it's wrong to do either book first. However, even though The Fallacy Detective was written first, I would do The Thinking Toolbox and then The Fallacy Detective. The Thinking Toolbox has 35-lessons about building reasoning skills. It gives you the big picture by defining terms such as fact, inference, opinion, premise, conclusion, hypothesis, etc. The Fallacy Detective has 36-lessons about recognizing bad reasoning. It defines terms such as red herring, ad hominem, genetic fallacy, etc., and looks at making assumptions, statistical fallacies, and propoganda.

[mcconnellboys]

I have these, but haven't looked at them yet in terms of scheduling them. I wonder if I could do a chapter of each, each week during school, and thus cover both of them over the course of a year? Or are the chapters too lengthy to allow for that?

[Susan in TN]

I don't think it's wrong to do either book first. However, even though The Fallacy Detective was written first, I would do The Thinking Toolbox and then The Fallacy Detective.

:iagree:

We did Fallacy Detective in 5th grade, but the different names of the fallacies became a bit tedious for my ds (who loves logic!) We did Thinking Toolbox for 6th grade and it was a much more gentle intro. to logic, and very interesting for him. With my younger kids, we'll do Thinking Toolbox first.

[Susan in TN]

I have these, but haven't looked at them yet in terms of scheduling them. I wonder if I could do a chapter of each, each week during school, and thus cover both of them over the course of a year? Or are the chapters too lengthy to allow for that?

Each lesson took us about 30 minutes - reading through the lesson and then answering questions. You could easily do 2 lessons a week.

[Beth in Central TX]

I think the problem with scheduling these books is that the chapters are too short. There are some discussion questions after each lesson that you can do to lengthen out the lesson. Even though, I was scheduling one chapter a week on Friday, but due to the short lesson length and the time lag between lessons, it felt very disjointed. It ended up being busy work, so I stopped the formal, scheduled lessons, and now my boys are just reading each book on their own.

Instead of doing a chapter from each book, I would do 2 lessons from 1 book and do each book back-to-back to be able to complete both books in a year. The 1st lesson of The Thinking Toolbox is about the truth of statements and the 1st lesson in The Fallacy Detective defines fallacies. Personally, I don't think they fit very well lesson-by-lesson, but I do think that The Fallacy Detective flows very well after The Thinking Toolbox.

HTH!

[mcconnellboys]

Thanks, ladies! I will start with Thinking Toolbox and do two lessons per week to finish both books in a year!