St Stephen's Primary School

The Social Critical Thinking Skill is two characters, who represent the co-operative nature of learning and the more demanding and sophisticated collaborative aspects of social learning. This skill involves learning, playing and working together.

The Improving your own learning critical thinking skill is represented running forward happily, continuously improving his learning by evaluating it. He has his thumb up to show how positive he is feeling with his own intrinsic learning goals. He understands that ability is not fixed. He has a growth mind-set.

The communication critical thinking skill is designed to reinforce the idea that communication skills should not emphasise verbal communication alone. It is designed to encourage teachers and adults to extend possibilities for children to represent and communicate their thinking e.g: the key is drawing his thinking but could equally be dancing, performing, singing or painting his thinking.

The reasoning critical thinking skill is represented with two hands in balance, weighing up this and that, yes and no, sure and not sure, pros and cons. He is 'weighing up' the possibilities and the probabilities. 

The exploring critical thinking skill has an exaggerated nose, ears , hands and feet to represent his use of all the senses in enquiring and exploring the world.

The information processing critical thinking skill has a rectangular face to represent some of the products we use to find our information, for example, books, television, the internet, articles  and newspapers.

The creative thinking critical thinking skill is blue to link to the popular term 'blue skies thinking' and he has a box to link to the colloquial term, 'thinking outside of the box'. Children will not necessarily be acquainted with these terms but they soon begin to understand how they relate to the attributes of creative thinking if their teachers make explicit references when they hear or see creative thinking.