By: Megan Prats

11/7/2014

Critical thinking is universal thus critical thinking development can take place at any point in learning. However, because critical thinking is 2learn®’s focus and specialty, you want to devote the majority of the lessons to where it is most prevalent. Thus, for language lessons, your focus should be sentence construction.

Sentence construction is where critical thinking takes place because this is the stage where the student needs to put the pieces of the puzzle together to solve the problem for herself. Thus, it is important for you to follow the following steps in laying the foundation to sentence construction so that critical thinking can dominate the majority of the process:

Substantive Foundation, and

The first step of sentence construction is to provide the student with the pieces of the puzzle. This is accomplished by laying out the substantive foundation for the student before you get into constructing a complete sentence. The substantive foundation is best presented to the student when it is done so in the following order (if the customized curriculum prohibits the following order, then use it as a guideline and not as a hard and fast rule):

1. Alphabet
2. Phonetics
3. Reading words
4. Vocabulary development
5. Parts of speech
6. Grammar rules for use of different parts of speech in a sentence.

1. Nouns
2. Articles
3. Adjectives

4. Verbs
5. Punctuation

Critical Thinking Development.

Critical thinking development takes place when the student struggles putting the pieces of the puzzle together. Thus, if you review the alphabet and then ask the student to pronounce the following word in Spanish – gato – and she can’t, critical thinking development should be the next step. Maybe she can’t pronounce gato because she struggles in navigating multi-step problems independently (she cannot separate the pronunciation of “gato” into individual letters and then put them together). Thus, it is time to act on what Multi-Step Problems states.

Sentence construction needs some substantive foundation in order to do critical thinking development so normally the substantive foundation precedes critical thinking
development. However, very little substantive foundation is enough to introduce a whole host of problems that involve critical thinking development thus, don’t be afraid to put critical thinking development into even learning the alphabet. You must be careful in laying the substantive foundation as if you put too much in front of the student, she won’t be forced to rely on her critical thinking skills to do the majority of the work. In general, sentence construction takes place in a two- step manner: 1) substantive foundation, and 2) critical thinking development.

© Megan Prats 2014

By: Megan Prats

11/7/2014

Critical thinking is universal thus critical thinking development can take place at any point in learning. However, because critical thinking is 2learn®’s focus and specialty, you want to devote the majority of the lessons to where it is most prevalent. Thus, for language lessons, your focus should be sentence construction.

Sentence construction is where critical thinking takes place because this is the stage where the student needs to put the pieces of the puzzle together to solve the problem for herself. Thus, it is important for you to follow the following steps in laying the foundation to sentence construction so that critical thinking can dominate the majority of the process:

Substantive Foundation, and

The first step of sentence construction is to provide the student with the pieces of the puzzle. This is accomplished by laying out the substantive foundation for the student before you get into constructing a complete sentence. The substantive foundation is best presented to the student when it is done so in the following order (if the customized curriculum prohibits the following order, then use it as a guideline and not as a hard and fast rule):

1. Alphabet
2. Phonetics
3. Reading words
4. Vocabulary development
5. Parts of speech
6. Grammar rules for use of different parts of speech in a sentence.

1. Nouns
2. Articles
3. Adjectives 4. Verbs
5. Punctuation

Critical Thinking Development.

Critical thinking development takes place when the student struggles putting the pieces of the puzzle together. Thus, if you review the alphabet and then ask the student to pronounce the following word in Spanish – gato – and she can’t, critical thinking development should be the next step. Maybe she can’t pronounce gato because she struggles in navigating multi-step problems independently (she cannot separate the pronunciation of “gato” into individual letters and then put them together). Thus, it is time to act on what Multi-Step Problems states.

Sentence construction needs some substantive foundation in order to do critical thinking development so normally the substantive foundation precedes critical thinking
development. However, very little substantive foundation is enough to introduce a whole host of problems that involve critical thinking development thus, don’t be afraid to put critical thinking development into even learning the alphabet. You must be careful in laying the substantive foundation as if you put too much in front of the student, she won’t be forced to rely on her critical thinking skills to do the majority of the work. In general, sentence construction takes place in a two- step manner: 1) substantive foundation, and 2) critical thinking development.

© Megan Prats 2014