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IWonderWhy book series. Chanced upon this while waiting in ped's office, non-fiction for younger age group.

Any suggestions how to gauge child's comprehension? The ones I am familiar with, are the comprehension tests that are done in school/tests where they give them a(or few) paragraphs and have a list of questions to answer. But how to check comprehension skill for the regular books that they read at home?

Thanks !

could you please suggest some resources that you use that i could also use with my kids....

MV ,

Have a quick question the books you suggested in this website : Critical Thinking – http://www.criticalthinking.com
I could not find reviews for these books online . They seem to be a bit expensive. For how long have you been using them ? Are all of them good , or do you buy / use certain books from this publisher ?

Thanks !

IdliVadaSambhar;278662MV ,

Have a quick question the books you suggested in this website : Critical Thinking ? http://www.criticalthinking.com
I could not find reviews for these books online . They seem to be a bit expensive. For how long have you been using them ? Are all of them good , or do you buy / use certain books from this publisher ?

Thanks !

Thanks for asking. Having spent $400 plus recently, I am dying to wax eloquent about them : )

I just checked, and reviews are available for Building Thinking Skills and Mind Benders on amazon.com. There should be reviews for the other books too.
Yes, they are a bit expensive, but compared to the ones I used to buy for $8 -$10 (JumpStart, REader Rabbit, DK dorling-Kindersley etc), these are worth it. I first bought the Building Thinking Skills books Level 2, then Level 3 ($25-30). these were pretty good, so I bought the Think Analogies and Mind benders. The last two were interesting enough to keep me interested.

Then, I got tired of evaluating if it is worth it or not, and pouring through their print catalog, and ordered the bundles. The books will be used over the summer and school year, and help when kid is waiting for sibling's extra curricular to get over. For my older one I started using them around 2nd grade, and for my younger one KG. The price does bother me at times, but I think of it as 1/5 of a month's tuition at a private school or a month or two worth of fees at Kumon and there are quite a few pages in the workbooks. To start off with, the Building Thinking Skills is a good book to get. I tried having my older kid use the book as a non-consumable (write answers on a multiple-choice sheet I print out) so my younger one can reuse, but gave up on that soon.

As with any of these workbooks, we can feel that the same thing is printable online, but the convenience is worth it.

anwesha;277726Any suggestions how to gauge child's comprehension? The ones I am familiar with, are the comprehension tests that are done in school/tests where they give them a(or few) paragraphs and have a list of questions to answer. But how to check comprehension skill for the regular books that they read at home?

try http://bookadventure.org

thanks a lot modus :)

I would like to add beestar to the list

anwesha;277809Folks,
I was reading a science book with my daughter and we read about why grass is green. The book stated, the grass looks green because it absorbs all colors in white light apart from green and reflects green. I gave her some more examples of color of sky etc.

Her response was- 'Yes, I know that mommy.. but I want to know why grass cannot absorb green'
My answer was, that is the property of grass, it cannot absorb that particular color, hence reflects it back. Is that right? While she didn't seem convinced, just nodded in agreement. Web search isn't taking me much further.
Appreciate any other explainations.

Anwesha, I faced a somewhat similar situation with my daughter. It is a concept that is a little tough to explain. The final question comes down to something like with the "how did the world begin" discussion. Frankly, I would say I am still stumped about the "origin of color". Anyway, I finally settled on each object naturally has certain "pigments". That seemed to satisfy her. She also was mighty tickled that I didn't know that primary colors of light are different than primary colors of art. In India, I never learnt about primary colors of art. Only knew about RBG primary colors.

An easy experiment to understand this concept more is using a shoebox, colored cellophane papers and colored objects like Lego Blocks. The book 101 Great Science Experiments has one version. If you go to amazon.com, and search inside the book for "banana" : ), it returns this experiment. A regular shoebox lined with black construction paper can be used instead of a black box. Multiple layer of cellophane paper is better than single.

You can try telling her that the sky had chosen blue, the soil had taken brown, flowers had taken all of the beautiful colors, and grass had no choice but to reflect "GREEN"!!! :)

Grass is green because of chlorophyll, which is a green pigment present in most plants. Likewise, the soil is brown due to the minerals and other organic matter found in it. Rocks come in several colors as well as several shades based on the mineral content. These are some of the examples I can think of.

Some of the resources I let my children use are the internet and a book series called "Children's Knowledge Bank". These books are quite informative, but do not have color pictures. It is a good reference guide for children in grades 2 and above.