• Elfie: Reasoning About Thinking Philosophy Text
• Recommended for students in 3rd grade
• Friday Online Class: 11:00 AM PST (2:00 PM EST) [50 minutes in length]

The cognitive skills emphasized in Elfie are foundational: they are those on which all-subsequent reasoning rests. Now the very notion of skill involves the notion of criterion, for a skill is a performance that is proficient in terms of a particular criterion. Therefore, the foundational skills in Elfie are accompanied by the criteria that are appropriate to them. These criteria are Sameness and Difference, and the skills are Distinction-making and Connection-making. Other operations like the making of comparisons, the discovery of uniformities, the identification of classes, the formation of concepts, the formulation of definitions all depend upon the logical infrastructure of these two sets of skills and criteria. Elfie should therefore be seen as the base of the Philosophy for Children program rather than merely an overture to it.