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I’m not sure why activities like “Read and write the names” have “Think” next to them, and unfortunately these are much more common than activities which really stretch their brains in imaginative ways. Examples of activities to also develop thinking skills include mixing primary colours and matching animals to their skeletons, and the thinking skills listed on the “Maps” range from “Paying attention to visual details” in Super Minds Starter to “Decoding and sequencing” in Super Minds 3. The most notable thing in the “Map” of each book is a column marked “Thinking skills”, and it is this focus on expanding young minds which explains the name of the series. In common with most recent books, it also has stickers and a DVD ROM at the back of the book, a rather moralistic tone (with “Value” written under each story), projects/ crafts that don’t necessarily produce a lot of English, and a CLIL component (“English for School”). Instructions that have little connection to motivating students to actually learn like “Listen and look” and “Listen and point” proliferate in both the Student’s Book and Teacher’s Book, and many of the “games” are nothing of the kind.
SUPERMIND E LEARNING SERIES
Each book in the series follows a group of characters through nine units, with a chant, song and picture story per unit. Having reviewed quite a few recent primary and pre-primary courses for MET and taught with many more, I must admit that they are all starting to blur together a bit and there are many aspects of Super Minds that might merge into that amorphous mess in my brain in a year or so. This is mainly a review of Super Minds 1 (which I had all components for) with some mention of how the series varies going down and up the levels (from Super Minds Starter, Super Minds 2, and Super Minds 3, which I only had the Student’s Books for). I think this more direct response to the materials also has its merits though… If you want to more carefully thought through and edited version, you’ll have to read the July edition of Modern English Teacher magazine.