Matt Perry Deductive Thinking and testing hypotheses

What I can think of is how my 5^th graders use a lot of deductive reasoning when they are answering questions I bring up during lecture. I have a habit of going back to previous lessons to bridge their knowledge to the new topic so they have something to relate to. The best example I have of this is when I was teaching about the Industrial Revolution. I had just finished the end of slavery part of my unit so it was fresh in their minds. The students were having a hard time understanding how you could have a revolution in one part of the country and the other part of the country was left behind. So I would pose them with questions like “ what do we know about the south’s economy both before and after the Civil War” this got their minds flowing and thinking about how the South was an agricultural society that depended on slavery. These types of questions got the students thinking down the path of how the Industrial Revolution changed the north before it changed the south after the Civil War. This teaches the students the "Sherlock Holmes" way of learning by breaking down challenges using prior knowledge. This is a key step towards them learning how to develop their hypotheses in a better way.