Brainteasers are a wonderful way to not only challenge young minds but to help them build those all important strategic, critical thinking and problem solving skills. Best of all, they are fun and students love them!

Playing games, solving brainteasers, and completing logic puzzles are just a few of the many ways students can have fun while building higher-level thinking skills.

In her book, 10 Critical Thinking Card Games, Elaine Richard explains the importance of developing critical thinking skills:

To become truly accomplished independent readers, children need to move beyond decoding and word knowledge, and develop critical thinking and reasoning skills. Honing these skills leads to better comprehension, which is the cornerstone of successful reading, understanding, and studying skills.

Even while teaching basic skills it’s easy to help your students’ develop higher-level thinking proficiencies. You can easily incorporate these critical thinking resources into your everyday lessons. Activities that promote higher level skills will complement your curriculum and help ensure your students’ retain more as they will be working on the higher levels of Bloom’s taxonomy.

The Activities for Fast Finishers series is packed with puzzles and brain teasers designed to keep them thinking and learning--even during those times in class when some students might be done with their work early. Also great as homework, these instant activities encourage your students to develop those important strategic and critical thinking skills while also learning needed vocabulary, math or language arts skills.

Keeping their minds challenged and intrigued is every teacher's goal--and finding just the right activity brings that goal so much closer!