Critical Thinking Press has taken their excellent formula for improving subject-area skill and higher-order thinking skills and applied it to science to help students improve both their scienctific knowledge AND thinking skills at the same time! The emphasis here is in helping students learn and understand science with a critical language arts slant so that they will learn to read science passages critically, and write full explanations of their thinking to reinforce their understanding. The books are divided into three units: physical science, life science, and earth science. Each unit contains over a dozen activities, each on a more specific sub-topic, and tied to national science standards. Each activity consists of both reading and question portions. The reading selection explains the concept in detail, with paragraphs separated and labeled by letter, and important vocabulary highlighted. The right-hand page features questions on the topic the student has just read about. Questions are presented in a variety of formats, including true/false, short answer (full-sentence responses), multiple-choice, graph questions, comparison/contrast and more. An answer key is included at the end of the book. The questions emphasize using “evidence” from the text, and really basing their answers on text evidence before choosing an answer. This helps reinforce what was read, and in many cases, requires the student to really think about their answer before giving it. This would be an excellent supplement to any science curriculum that will aid the student in really understanding concepts, where other workbooks may merely ask the student to regurgitate facts. I could even see using this alongside a full science curriculum for added reasoning and critical thinking benefits! After a long wait, Book A1 is now available; hopefully there will be more to follow! - Jess