Critical thinking activities such as providing each student with the same problem that is also solvable using a number of solutions build a strong foundation for higher-level thinking. After allowing students to work on the problem either alone or in groups, they can reveal to the class how they solved the problem and why. As a result, the students become aware of critical thinking skills by knowing there are multiple paths to solve issues and problems in historic and modern societies.
Oral language activities provide students with opportunities to practice real-world language skills that advance each student’s language learning aptitudes. Activities that require the student verbally narrate an event teach students how to use language expressively. Thus, students become capable of responding effectively and appropriately to social, historic and personal issues. Orally presenting research projects to the class are activities that instruct middle school students how to present the concept of critical thinking by explaining how they come to reach the conclusion of their research.
Reading activities using specific material increase students' aptitude for creating and evaluating criteria. For example, provide a passage from a classical author such as Aristotle and a current style of English such as modern fiction to the class. Have the class write down a list of noticeable differences between a descriptive passage written by Aristotle and the descriptive passage written by a modern fiction writer. Aspects of this assignment increase students' aptitude to recognize that texts vary in delivery and purpose depending upon their message to their intended audience.
Writing grammatical activities increase higher-level thinking on the sentence and word level. Having students copy passages from different types of documents teaches students how language and grammar change depending upon the goal of the text. This activity also illustrates how the tense of the writing and the variety of sentence types regulate how the audience receives the message within the text. As a result, students learn how to interpret and compose information on a written and spoken level.