Teenagers are often overwhelmed with abstract thoughts that seem to lead them nowhere but confusion itself. Although students in this age group are growing in their ability to craft abstract thoughts, they lack the experience to transform them into practical applications. With God’s grace, Standards of Excellence focuses on students in the age range of 13 – 18 in the quest to help train them to become strong students as well as take intangible concepts and create skills for useful reasoning.
Standards of Excellence has developed a new course called “Study Skills and Critical Thinking ” The focus of this course is the development of competence in the vital disciplines of study skills, critical thinking, figural logic, and informal logic.
Success 4 Students ® helps students develop the strong study skills they need for success, including
The amalgamation of the skills developed though our course will bolster your teen’s confidence and give him or her important tools for a successful academic experience. Miss Viv will meld the course textbooks’ content with fun and games that will help your teen explore and cement important thinking, communication and study skills.
Setting goals
Managing time
Listening
Taking notes
Studying
Taking tests
Just think of how teens will grow as they learn to outline, summarize, paraphrase, and follow directions. They’ll also learn about study tools, such as mnemonic devices, assignment books, and graphic organizers.
The Study Skills curriculum includes the following chapters:
Chapter 1 - Introducing Student Success
Chapter 2 - Using Your Student Planner
Chapter 3 - The Importance of Vision
Chapter 5 - Planning Your Future
Chapter 6 - Using Your Daily Planner to Track Your Goals
Chapter 7 - Keeping Track of School Work
Chapter 8 - Learning Styles
Chapter 9 - Listening and Paraphrasing
Chapter 10 - Making and Using Symbols
Chapter 11 - Memory Skills
Chapter 12 - Note Taking
Chapter 13 - Prioritizing and Decision Making
Chapter 14 - Reading Faster
Chapter 15 - How to Study
Chapter 17 - Test Taking
Chapter 18 - Communication through Writing
Chapter 19 - Pitfalls of Procrastination
Chapter 20 - Final Summary Project
The specific unit on learning styles helps students see how they learn best. They learn to adapt, or change, their learning styles to fit the situations they are in. If they can do that in academics, they are more likely to be successful students.
Some of our advocates have suggested this course be a High School Preparatory course or part of a Middle School SAT course. We believe it will be even more significant than that! We believe strongly that the skill development, self discipline, and practical training will help all teens transform their efforts from a workbook completion mindset to one set for academic achievement! Register Online at www.txsoe.com
Building Thinking Skills® provides highly effective verbal and nonverbal reasoning activities to improve students’ vocabulary, reading, writing, math, logic, and figural-spatial skills, as well as their visual and auditory processing. This exceptional skill set provides a solid foundation for academic excellence and success on any assessment test.
The activities are sequenced developmentally. Each skill (for example, classifying) is presented first in the semi-concrete figural-spatial form and then in the abstract verbal form. Students learn to analyze relationships between objects, between words, and between objects and words as they:
Observe, recognize, and describe characteristics.
Distinguish similarities and differences.
Identify and complete sequences, classifications, and analogies.
These processes help students develop superior thinking and communication skills that lead to deeper content learning in all subjects. The “Building Thinking Skills” text helps students to grasp analysis, discernment, and fallacious reasoning prevalent within the world today.