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Year 6 critical thinking

Year 6 critical thinking runs to 36 lessons across a 36 week year, for children aged 10 to 11 in Key Stage 2. Every lesson is listed below in teaching order.

The vocabulary a child meets this year includes claim, logical fallacy, counter-argument, confirmation bias, rebuttal, inference, explicit, evidence, reasoning, conclusion, hypothesis, alternative explanation.

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

Every Year 6 critical thinking lesson

In the order they are taught. 36 lessons.

  1. Mapping the Full Toolkit: Retrieving and Connecting Everything From Years 3–5
  2. What Is Inference? Reading Between the Lines to Find What Is Not Stated
  3. Strong and Weak Inferences: How Far Can Evidence Really Take Us?
  4. Stated or Inferred? Annotating Texts Like a Detective
  5. What Is an Unstated Assumption? Finding the Missing Link That Makes an Argument Work
  6. Digging for Hidden Assumptions: Practising With Everyday Arguments and Short Adverts
  7. Does the Assumption Hold? Testing Hidden Premises Against Counter-Examples
  8. Are Unstated Assumptions Always Dishonest? Arguing About When Hidden Premises Are Acceptable
  9. What Is Precision? How the Exact Words We Choose Change the Meaning of a Claim
  10. Practising Precision: Rewriting Vague Claims as Specific, Testable Statements
  11. When Precision Is Used to Mislead: Investigating Technically True but Deceptive Claims
  12. Review: Inference, Unstated Assumptions, and Precision — Connecting and Retrieving Weeks 2–11
  13. What Is Framing? How the Same Facts Can Be Presented to Create Different Impressions
  14. Spotting the Frame: Comparing Two Accounts of the Same Event
  15. Creating a Dual-Frame News Report: Writing the Same Story From Two Contrasting Perspectives
  16. Frame Detection: Annotating Headlines, Graphs, and Statistics
  17. What Is the Burden of Proof? Deciding Who Must Provide Evidence When a Claim Is Made
  18. Investigating the Burden of Proof: Who Carries It in Adverts, News, and Classroom Debates?
  19. Should the Burden of Proof Be Different for Different Types of Claim?
  20. Burden of Proof: Sorting Claims by the Evidence They Need
  21. What Is Probability Language? Using Words Like 'Likely', 'Possible', and 'Certain' Accurately
  22. Calibrating Probability Language: Matching Uncertainty Words to Evidence
  23. What Is Motivated Reasoning? When We Decide the Conclusion First and Find Reasons Afterwards
  24. Investigating Motivated Reasoning: Why Two People Can Watch the Same Game and See Different Things
  25. Can We Ever Fully Overcome Motivated Reasoning?
  26. Motivated Reasoning Detection: Annotating Persuasive Texts
  27. Review: Framing, Burden of Proof, Probability Language, and Motivated Reasoning
  28. What Is an Argument's Scope? Understanding the Difference Between 'All', 'Most', 'Some', and 'This One Case'
  29. Practising Scope Identification: Rewriting Arguments to Match Their Scope to Their Evidence
  30. Creating a Critical Thinker's Evidence Dossier: Compiling and Evaluating Sources on a Real-World Question
  31. What Is a Principle? Identifying the Underlying Rule That Drives an Argument
  32. Testing Principles for Consistency: Does the Rule Apply Equally in Every Relevant Case?
  33. Should the Same Rules Apply to Everyone, or Are Some Exceptions Justified?
  34. Putting the Whole Year 6 Toolkit Together: Analysing an Unseen Argumentative Text
  35. Creating a Year 6 Reasoning Handbook: Illustrating Inference, Framing, Burden of Proof, and Motivated Reasoning With Original Examples
  36. Year 6 Critical Thinking Review: Putting All Six Skills 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 6 critical thinking cover?
Year 6 critical thinking runs to 36 lessons across a 36 week year, covering claim, logical fallacy, counter-argument, confirmation bias, rebuttal, inference and more.
How many critical thinking lessons are in Year 6?
36 lessons, sequenced in teaching order across the school year.
How old is a child in Year 6?
Children in Year 6 are 10 to 11 years old during the school year in England and Wales.