3rd Grade Thinking Skills || Timberdoodle Kit Review

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Learning through games? Yes, please! Timberdoodle Thinking Skills are always a hit with brain-challenging games and fun lessons.

Our school year is just starting, but the Thinking Skills games have been played since the day we got our Timberdoodle box! What makes critical thinking more fun than playing a game? Playing two games of course!

A special thanks to Timberdoodle Co. for sponsoring this blog series by providing a complimentary curriculum kit for our honest review. All opinions are our own!

Why Thinking Skills

The importance of convergent and divergent thinking skills can’t be ignored, both in academics and in practical life skills. While few curriculums offer Thinking Skills as a category for every grade preschool-12th, I believe this is an area that Timberdoodle really stands out in.

Timberdoodle Co. puts incredible thought into selecting the best available resources for each grade to learn from. We’ve used almost every age level kit from infant to 3rd grade and we’ve never been disappointed by the selections. Let’s dive right into this year’s picks!

Battle Sheep

The 3rd grade two+ player game is Battle Sheep, a game of strategy and abstract thinking that’s fun for kids, but also engaging for adults.

Fun for up to 4 players, Battle Sheep offers a unique gameboard that can be put together in different designs each time, creating new challenges every time you play.

The objective is simple–get as many of your sheep tiles spread across the board as possible. But the action requires critical thinking, abstract thought, focus, and planning ahead. These are essential life skills that kids often don’t engage in, so games like this make it fun to practice.

Each player chooses a color of sheep tiles and places their entire stack of 16 tiles on one outer spot on the gameboard. Then, taking turns, each player moves by splitting the stack and moving their new stack in a straight line until it hits another stack of sheep or the last open spot on the board. One tile must be left in the original stack, and players can block in their opponents by surrounding them.

The player who controls the most field space is the winner. The first time we played there was a little trial and error as we tried to figure out how it worked, but after that, my daughter caught on quickly and was ready to battle like a pro.

I appreciate the sturdy pasture board pieces and cute, clever sheep designs on the tiles. But most of all, I love how games like this help my kiddo to think and strategize in new ways. There’s never complaining, just begging for more! My daughter is competitive and loves to win, so as soon as she realized that she could control the strategy of the game, she was all in for playing again, and again, (and again).

Critical & Creative 3

To help students think both inside and outside the box, Evan Moor created Critical & Creative Thinking Activities workbooks.

Grade 3 is similar to Grade 2, which we did last year. With simple black-and-white spreads, each 3 page topic features probing questions, puzzles, drawing, math problems, and more to stimulate your little learner to think critically.

If you have a struggling reader/writer, as I do, you will have to work through each page with them, asking questions orally, or writing answers for them. Sometimes I also skip sections that are too advanced or repetitive for her.

While I don’t love the black-and-white pages, they are not distracting for the student and allow them to focus on the questions at hand. I do love the variety of topics covered in the book. We do a 3 page spread once a week and will finish in the school year.

Smart Dog

Each kit comes with a single-player game, and 3rd grade has Smart Dog Agility Course by SmartGames.

I love the small, portable box that keeps all the pieces and game booklet inside safely. There are 60 challenges ranging from Starter to Wizard, and each challenge shows you how to set up the game board to begin. You finish the challenge by placing all the remaining pieces onto the board following the rules on the first page, and then check your answer with the solutions in the back of the booklet.

My daughter jumped right into this game and wanted to do challenge after challenge. During the year we schedule doing just two challenges per week to finish up in 30 weeks. The starter challenges are fairly simple, but as you progress, they really take some thinking and might even have the adults stumped!

Watch the Video:

Final Thoughts on 3rd Grade Thinking Skills

It’s critically important to teach our kids to think for themselves. As they grow, these valuable lessons in planning, attention to detail, and abstract thought will create a solid foundation that will serve them well in life. It’s a huge bonus that Timberdoodle makes it fun by including single-player and multi-player games to brighten up the school day! Check out the 3rd Grade Timberdoodle kit here.