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Year 4 critical thinking

Year 4 critical thinking runs to 36 lessons across a 36 week year, for children aged 8 to 9 in Key Stage 2. Every lesson is listed below in teaching order.

The vocabulary a child meets this year includes claim, reason, counter-argument, safe generalisation, analogy, familiar, mislead, critical thinker, T-chart, breaks down, persuade, misleading analogy.

We wrote these lessons ourselves. Oak does not publish critical thinking, so the sequence, the content and the checks are all ours.

Every Year 4 critical thinking lesson

In the order they are taught. 36 lessons.

  1. What We Already Know: Mapping Our Year 3 Thinking Toolkit Before We Build Further
  2. What Is an Analogy? Recognising When We Explain One Thing by Comparing It to Another
  3. Does the Analogy Hold? Testing Whether a Comparison Really Works
  4. Practising Analogy Evaluation: Is This Comparison Fair or Misleading?
  5. What Is an Implicit Claim? Finding the Hidden Message Behind a Statement
  6. Digging for Hidden Claims: Practising With Headlines, Adverts, and Everyday Sentences
  7. Whose Interest Is It? How a Speaker's Position Can Shape What They Claim
  8. Should Schools Advertise Products to Children? Arguing With Interest and Evidence in Mind
  9. What Is Correlation? When Two Things Change Together But One May Not Cause the Other
  10. Correlation vs. Causation: Investigating Claims From Newspapers and Everyday Life
  11. Correlation or Causation? Sorting Real and Made-Up Claims Into Two Piles
  12. Review: Analogies, Implicit Claims, Vested Interest, and Correlation — Connecting Weeks 2–11
  13. What Is Ambiguity? Noticing When a Word or Sentence Can Mean More Than One Thing
  14. Spotting Ambiguity in Arguments: Does the Claim Change Meaning Under a Different Reading?
  15. Precise Language Practice: Rewriting Vague Claims to Make Them Clear and Testable
  16. What Is a Slippery Slope? Examining the Claim That One Step Will Lead to Disaster
  17. Is the Slope Really Slippery? Evaluating the Evidence Behind Chain-of-Consequences Claims
  18. Should Children Choose Their Own Bedtime? Spotting Slopes and Chains in Real Arguments
  19. What Is a Straw Man? Recognising When Someone Misrepresents the Other Side's Argument
  20. Straw Man Detective: Comparing Original Claims to How They Are Reported
  21. What Is an Appeal to Popularity? When 'Everyone Does It' Is Not a Good Reason
  22. Should You Trust the Celebrity? Appeals to Authority and Popularity
  23. Is It Ever Enough to Say 'Everyone Thinks So'? Arguing About the Limits of Popular Opinion
  24. Argument Mapping: Drawing the Full Structure of a Multi-Reason Argument
  25. What Is Evidence Quality? Ranking Primary Sources, Expert Reports, and Personal Stories
  26. Evaluating Evidence Quality in Context: Which Source Would Change Your Mind?
  27. Review: Ambiguity, Slippery Slope, Straw Man, Appeals, and Evidence Quality — Retrieving Weeks 13–26
  28. Putting the Pieces Together: Analysing a Full Short Article Using Every Tool Learned This Year
  29. Writing a Fully Structured Argument: Claim, Reasons, Evidence, Counter-Argument, Rebuttal, Conclusion
  30. Practising Full Argument Writing: Three Different Topics, One Consistent Structure
  31. What Is a Thought Experiment? Using Imaginary Scenarios to Test an Argument's Limits
  32. Testing Principles With Thought Experiments: Does the Rule Still Hold?
  33. Creating a Critical Thinker's Casebook: Illustrating Each Reasoning Skill With a Real or Made-Up Example
  34. Debate: Is Social Media Harmful to Children?
  35. Practising Flexible Thinking: Applying This Year's Toolkit to Unseen Arguments
  36. Year 4 Critical Thinking Review: Putting Your Whole Toolkit Together

Teach the first critical thinking lesson free

StudyDen puts the next critical thinking lesson on the screen each morning, marks what your child types and writes the record as they go. The first lesson needs no card, then it is £29.99 a month for every child in the family.

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Common questions

What does Year 4 critical thinking cover?
Year 4 critical thinking runs to 36 lessons across a 36 week year, covering claim, reason, counter-argument, safe generalisation, analogy, familiar and more.
How many critical thinking lessons are in Year 4?
36 lessons, sequenced in teaching order across the school year.
How old is a child in Year 4?
Children in Year 4 are 8 to 9 years old during the school year in England and Wales.