← Year 5

Year 5 critical thinking

Year 5 critical thinking runs to 36 lessons across a 36 week year, for children aged 9 to 10 in Key Stage 2. Every lesson is listed below in teaching order.

The vocabulary a child meets this year includes claim, vested interest, correlation, counter-argument, rebuttal, logical fallacy, conclusion, reason, reasoning, sufficient reason, unstated leap, the 'Because' Test.

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

Every Year 5 critical thinking lesson

In the order they are taught. 36 lessons.

  1. Mapping Our Thinking Toolkit: What We Already Know From Years 2–4
  2. What Is a Logical Fallacy? Recognising When Reasoning Goes Wrong
  3. The 'Because' Test: Checking Whether a Reason Actually Proves Its Claim
  4. Practising the 'Because' Test: Sorting Arguments Into Strong, Weak, and Broken
  5. What Is a False Dilemma? When Arguments Pretend There Are Only Two Choices
  6. Debating False Dilemmas: Are There Always More Than Two Sides?
  7. Spotting False Dilemmas in Headlines and Adverts: Practice With Real Examples
  8. What Is Circular Reasoning? When the Conclusion Is Hidden Inside the Reason
  9. Circular Reasoning vs. Valid Argument: Investigating the Difference With Short Texts
  10. Fixing Broken Arguments: How to Repair a Circular Reason
  11. What Is Hasty Generalisation? When One or Two Examples Prove Too Much
  12. Review: False Dilemmas, Circular Reasoning, and Hasty Generalisation
  13. Hasty Generalisation vs. Safe Generalisation: Investigating the Role of Sample Size and Variety
  14. Writing Generalisations Carefully: Practising Hedged Claims Across Different Topics
  15. What Is an Ad Hominem Attack? When Arguments Target the Person, Not the Point
  16. Ad Hominem vs. Relevant Personal Information: When Does Who Speaks Actually Matter?
  17. Should Children's Views on School Rules Be Taken Seriously? Spotting Ad Hominem Attacks
  18. What Is an Appeal to Emotion? When Feelings Are Used as a Substitute for Evidence
  19. Investigating Emotional Appeals in Real Adverts and Campaign Materials
  20. Emotion vs. Evidence: Annotating Persuasive Texts
  21. Creating a Fact-Checker's Toolkit: Building a Personal Checklist for Evaluating Any Argument
  22. What Is Confirmation Bias? How We Tend to Notice Evidence That Agrees With Us
  23. Testing for Confirmation Bias: Investigating How Two People Interpret the Same Data Differently
  24. Is It Possible to Be Completely Unbiased? Arguing About the Limits of Objectivity
  25. Practising Debiasing Strategies: Applying 'Consider the Opposite' and 'Seek Disconfirming Evidence' to Real Questions
  26. What Is Overconfidence? When We Are More Certain Than Our Evidence Warrants
  27. Review: Ad Hominem, Appeal to Emotion, Confirmation Bias, and Overconfidence
  28. Calibrating Confidence: Using Probability Language to Match Evidence to Certainty
  29. What Is a Red Herring? When an Argument Introduces Irrelevant Information to Distract
  30. Red Herrings in Practice: Investigating Political Speeches and Debate Transcripts
  31. Should Homework Be Abolished? A Full Structured Debate Using Every Year 5 Reasoning Tool
  32. Putting the Whole Toolkit Together: Analysing an Unseen Persuasive Article
  33. Creating a Reasoning Errors Field Guide: Illustrating Every Fallacy Covered This Year With Original Examples
  34. Thinking About Thinking: What Is Metacognition and Why Does It Make Us Better Reasoners?
  35. Practising Metacognitive Self-Evaluation: Reviewing and Improving a Piece of Your Own Earlier Reasoning
  36. Year 5 Critical Thinking Review: From Reasoning Errors to Metacognition

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.

Start the first lesson free

Common questions

What does Year 5 critical thinking cover?
Year 5 critical thinking runs to 36 lessons across a 36 week year, covering claim, vested interest, correlation, counter-argument, rebuttal, logical fallacy and more.
How many critical thinking lessons are in Year 5?
36 lessons, sequenced in teaching order across the school year.
How old is a child in Year 5?
Children in Year 5 are 9 to 10 years old during the school year in England and Wales.