You could be forgiven for thinking you were eavesdropping on an LA therapy group. Several individuals appear to be sharing homespun philosophy. “The more time goes by, the more differences you see,” remarks one particularly earnest participant.

But this isn’t Learning Anonymous. In fact, it’s a six-year-old discussing his first experience of a collaborative learning game. The activity is Clown Faces, a deceptively simple descriptive game from the Let’s Think! programme - a teaching resource for developing thinking skills in five and six-year-olds. The discussion is on how observation skills are best employed.

“The more you play the game and keep on looking, the quicker you spot the differences,” one girl astutely advises another, more impatient player.

Testing the contents of the Let’s Think Kit Bag (the resource comes in a handy blue nylon holdall, accompanied by a ring-bound guide for teachers) has yielded surprising results. Unexpected strengths in children’s powers of self-observation have been revealed. The quieter, more reflective children have found themselves on level terms with their livelier classmates.

Hammersmith and Fulham LEA worked with colleagues from King’s College London and 14 of their own primary schools to develop Let’s Think! The aim of the teaching package is to encourage young children to understand their own learning and thinking strategies.

Jeanette Riches, a graduate trainee teacher at Parkside Community School, Borehamwood, where Let’s Think! has been used, felt the games helped to reveal or confirm personalities. “I expected Charlotte to like the Clown Faces game as she has a good sense of description,” she says. “She also enjoyed Farmyard, working out how to describe a view or perspective. Charlotte possesses great focus and it really showed.”

Some staff were understandably concerned about having yet another piece of work to accommodate, another priority to juggle, even though all agreed that carefully structured learning is just as important as carefully structured teaching. So how exactly do you fit such a radical programme - learning about learning - in a typical Year 1 class?

Lets Think! consists of a rolling programme of 30 half-hour activities for five groups of six children each week. The authors provide some helpful advice on how such a rota could run alongside other activities for the majority of the class, which would be difficult without the benefit of learning assistants or volunteer helpers. The Teacher’s Guide provides each session with a clear structure, starting with an introduction to the materials, consolidation of relevant prior learning and presentation of the task. The key issues and connections between learning strands are explained using fact boxes. Each activity is also described in terms of the thinking processes they develop and their potential for being applied in other learning. Over the full programme of 27 activities it is claimed that children will enhance their grasp of listening skills and concrete operations such as seriation, classification, time-sequencing, causality, spatial perception and the rules of a game.

sEarly sessions, such as Clown Faces, Space and Animals, explore these key skills through descriptive work in a fun and competitive game setting. Individual self-discipline is supported by encouraging eye contact, turn-taking and careful self-expression.

The main body of activities follow on with a mix of collaborative work encouraging respect for the role and contribution of others.

A good example is the Marble Run game, in which children are set the challenge of creating the longest possible track using any permutation of 10 from 20 chutes provided. The real challenge emerges in the need for teamwork, sharing the decisions and rationale for the choice of chutes.

During interventions and the summing up at the end of each session, children review how their learning has been applied. For example, they may be asked to consider the difficulties they encountered during the game and those processes that provided resolution.

Evaluation of the original Let’s Think! project showed startling gains in cognitive development. Teacher observation confirmed the claims of children improving their ability to verbalise working processes as well as extending their collaborative skills. The activities certainly provide that rare mix of entertainment and insight into individual learning styles.

LET’S THINK! complete set (including Teacher’s Guide, resource pack and 3-D materials presented in a nylon bag). Price: pound;135 plus VAT. Teacher’s Guide alone. Price: pound;55 plus VAT. Resource Pack (not including 3-D materials). Price: pound;55 plus VAT. Tel: 0845 6021937 www.nfer-nelson.co.uk

Jon O’Connor is the head of Parkside Community School, Borehamwood, Hertfordshire