We’re adding more logic to our homeschooling lessons this year and one of the concepts we’re working on is analogies.
When I was in school, I started learning about analogies in about third grade (I think). It was usually presented as part of language class, but they’re really a study in logic. Go figure!
I recently got the chance to try two great resources from Prufrock Press that were a huge help in teaching analogies to elementary students! See how we implemented them below!
*Note: I received these resources in exchange for this review. All opinions are my own and I was not required to post a positive review.*
Since I wanted to cover analogies with two different grades (fifth and second), I used two different books:
I thought that I’d have to spend some time talking about what analogies were and how to solve them, but all of the instructions were right in the book! Easy-peasy!
Pooh, who’s in second grade, started with the first few exercises in Analogies for Beginners. He blew through the first couple, but then he started missing some of the similar attributes in the others.
I had him slow down and describe each shape. Generally, once he did so, he could easily spot the matching figure. “The big circle with the medium circle inside is like the big circle with the tiny circle inside as the big rectangle with the medium rectangle inside is like the….big circle with the tiny rectangle inside!” 🙂
Tigger, who’s in fifth grade, took a crack at Thinking Through Analogies. I had her read the introduction on her own to see if she’d understand how to do the exercises herself.
As you can see, these analogies are structured in a more advanced way (as they should be). They also work with words, rather than shapes. Since Tigger is a language lover, she liked them a lot.
What I really liked about this book is that in the beginning, the lessons introduce students to the particular concept they will be examining. That’s a huge help, because kids don’t have to sit there and figure out how the word pairs are related.
Once they understand the types of relationships that analogies use, they’ll be able to spot them on their own later in the book.
But what I loved about the exercises is that the vocabulary words were challenging enough to force Tigger to get out the dictionary. 🙂 It was logic, critical thinking, language arts, and research skills all in one!
I found both of these books to be a huge help in teaching analogies to elementary students! If you’d like to see more of the resources available from Prufrock Press, visit the company’s website to learn more!
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