Logical deduction, solved properly

These questions look like puzzles and children treat them like puzzles — reading the clues, thinking hard, then guessing. They are not puzzles. They are a procedure, and the procedure fits in a minute.

A typical question

The method: cross out, don't guess

Draw a grid. People down the side, possibilities across the top. Then take the clues one at a time and put a cross in every box a clue rules out.

Ava's row now has only one empty box, so Ava owns the fish — and if Ava owns the fish, nobody else can, so the rest of the fish column is out.

Chloe owns the rabbit. Notice that the answer was never guessed. It was the last box standing.

The two rules that make the grid work

1. One tick per row and one per column. Each person has exactly one pet and each pet has exactly one owner. So a tick immediately crosses out the rest of its row and the rest of its column. Children reliably remember the row and forget the column.
2. A row with one empty box is solved. And so is a column with one empty box. Keep checking both after every clue.

"Must be true" is a different question

The other common Thinking Skills format looks like this:

The answer is A, and the reasoning is mechanical: every swan in the park is white, this is a swan in the park, therefore it is white. No room for doubt.

B reverses the statement, which is never allowed — "all swans are white" says nothing about whether other white birds exist. C contradicts what we were told. D is a trap for children who overthink.

The test for these: try to invent a situation where the statements are all true but the conclusion is false. If you can invent one, the conclusion does not must-be-true. If you genuinely cannot, it does.

Another worked one

Dev takes tennis, Finn takes soccer — both columns close. Ella is barred from netball and soccer, and tennis is already gone, so only hockey remains. Ella plays hockey, and the fourth friend takes netball. Three clues, no guessing, about twenty seconds.

Why this section is worth preparing for

Thinking Skills needs no curriculum knowledge, which is exactly why it is so often left alone — there is nothing obvious to revise. But it is a quarter of the NSW Selective test (40 questions in 40 minutes) and a third of the Opportunity Class test (30 questions in 30 minutes).

A child who has never seen a grid question guesses and loses time. A child who has been taught the method solves the same question in under a minute, calmly. That gap is not intelligence. It is instruction, and it closes in a few weeks.