Snowman Visual Logic
Teaching critical thinking skills to early elementary kids can be tough when a child still struggles with reading complete sentences. But, what if you take out the need to read and just focus on building logic and reasoning?
Take a look at this:
If you’ve ever played the old Zoombinis Logical Journey computer game
The snowmen in this picture have 3 different features that they can possibly share:
- Type of Hat
- Type of Scarf
- Type of Arms
The top group of 3 snowmen all wear the same long, yellow hat and have stick arms with 3 “fingers” each. Each of the snowmen’s scarf is different, however.
To answer the question, Which snowman belongs to the group, students have to be able to:
- Recognize the rules for belonging to the group and
- Visually discriminate those rules from the possible answer options
Why Is Visual Discrimination Important?
Being able to pick out subtle differences in spelling patterns is a critical skill for becoming a successful reader. Mistaking similar looking letters can be the difference between “cat” and “cot”. Not noticing a specific letter within a word can make “stick” become “sick”. The implications for reading comprehension, as you can imagine, are significant.
Solving visual logic puzzles gives kids the chance to practice paying attention to details – to sorting and classifying information – and building deductive reasoning skills. While most kids think they’re getting a day off from learning when they work on tasks like the Snowmen Visual Logic Puzzles, they’re actually building important visual discrimination and critical thinking skills that form the basis for future academic success.
Want More Logic Puzzles With Minimal Reading?
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- More Snowmen Visual Logic Puzzles
Get 10 more logic puzzles, just like the one above. - Winter Ordinal Logic
Students read simple rebus clues and use deductive reasoning to figure out which order the winter pictures line up. - Critical Thinking Christmas Cards
Up the challenge level with this set of 20 logic puzzles featuring 5 different types of mind bending activities.
I loved Zoombinis! My students did, too. That snowman challenge was definitely challenging! I had to read your clues more than once to figure out the correct answer. 🙂
— Susan
The ESL Connection
Wouldn’t critical thinking allow the student to make a choice and defend it? A better test is to see what groups the child can make and define. This is more akin to Set. It also rewards creative thought, which standardized and multiple choice tests punish.
Great question – and yes, teaching critical thinking and reasoning skills to kids definitely encourages flexible thinking and having them present testable “theories” that they can defend. There are many questions in life that can be solved with more than one answer and it’s important for kids to learn to see problems from multiple angles. The activity you describe, of having kids make and define their own groups, would be a wonderful follow-up activity to this lesson, which give younger kids the opportunity to practice and hone their observation and classification skills.