Logic puzzles for 6th

[SilverMoon]

If your rising 6th grader loved puzzles, stumpers, and such, and was wicked good at them, what would you give him? Any subject as the medium.

Mind/Word/Visual Benders don't stand a chance. He flew through them. 🙃

I'ma try the 7th/8th grade Reasoning & Reading next. He likes the MOEMS (Math Olympiad) problems. Beast probably won't have the upper puzzle books done in time for him. 

[alisha]

I would go with games where the easier levels are learning and they get harder. These are all solitaire games:

Colorku
anything by age from smartgames.eu, especially Walls & Warriors, Penguins on Ice, 
thinkfun logic games (https://www.thinkfun.com/products/type/logic-games/) Especially Gravity Maze, Laser Maze, 
marble circuit
mindware's logic links booklets (Level C or D)
IQ set of games-We like IQ Twist and IQ candy
solitaire chess

Or Multi Person Games such as Set or Swish.

[Lori D.]

Don't know if these would be too easy for your advanced DS, but these are some that our DSs enjoyed:

Critical Thinking Activities in Patterns, Imagery, Logic (gr. 7-12)-- Dale Seymour
10-Minute Critical-Thinking Activities for English (gr. 7-10) -- Deborah Eaton; Walch Publishers
10-Minute Critical-Thinking Activities for Algebra (gr. 7-10) -- Hope Martin; Walch Publishers

Think-A-Grams (Critical Thinking Press)
Word Winks; More Word Winks; Even More Word Winks (like Think-A-Grams) -- pub. by Mindware
Plexers, More Plexers (like Think-A-Grams) -- by Dale Hammond

No personal experience, but possibly:

Martin Gardiner books:
My Best Mathematical and Logic Puzzles
The Colossal Book of Mathematics: Classic Puzzles, Paradoxes, and Problems
The Colossal Book of Short Puzzles and Problems
Entertaining Mathematical Puzzles
Mathematics, Magic, and Mystery
Hexaflexagons, Probability Paradoxes, and the Tower of Hanoi
Knots and Borromean Rings, Rep-Tiles, and Eight Queens
Origami, Eleusis, and the Soma Cube
Sphere Packing, Lewis Carroll, and Reversii


ETA:
Two physics/math real-life application games that are really cool:
World of Goo
Kerbal Space Program

Edited May 24, 2022 by Lori D.

[PeterPan]

4 hours ago, SilverMoon said:

If your rising 6th grader loved puzzles, stumpers, and such, and was wicked good at them, what would you give him? Any subject as the medium.

Mind/Word/Visual Benders don't stand a chance. He flew through them. 🙃

I'ma try the 7th/8th grade Reasoning & Reading next. He likes the MOEMS (Math Olympiad) problems. Beast probably won't have the upper puzzle books done in time for him. 

https://www.amazon.com/Colossal-Book-Mathematics-Paradoxes-Problems/dp/0393020231/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=colossal+book+of+mathematics&qid=1653367609&sprefix=colossal+book+of+%2Caps%2C193&sr=8-1  I've got this at my desk right now and it's pretty cool. I'm not saying it's on level, but then you said you don't want on level. 😄 You just need to get in the right vein to move up, so find one author and start rabbit trailing on amazon, kwim? 

When I was his age I got a book of Escher and would just pour over it. I didn't have a clue what I was reading, but I liked it. Still have the book btw. Years later I saw it listed as a text for some kind of high level philosophy of math class. 😂

[PeterPan]

Here's that book on Escher btw. It's pretty cool if you can snag a copy, lots of interesting illustrations and really bizarre stories that you sort of think you're understanding when you read them and then don't, lol. 

https://www.amazon.com/Gödel-Escher-Bach-Eternal-Golden/dp/0394756827/ref=sr_1_2?crid=J6ORGJCRW8V5&keywords=philosophy+of+escher&qid=1653367979&sprefix=philosophy+of+escher%2Caps%2C123&sr=8-2

 Oh look, it's still in print! https://www.amazon.com/Gödel-Escher-Bach-Eternal-Golden/dp/0465026567/ref=pd_sbs_sccl_1_1/133-9714908-5809560?pd_rd_w=j8E1c&pf_rd_p=44b0dc04-f99a-4419-a406-9567d0fa03fe&pf_rd_r=0MG9D76CFJRBSJN1BQYN&pd_rd_r=ec9dc820-bbda-4e1e-bdc0-faaa05306758&pd_rd_wg=fJZkM&pd_rd_i=0465026567&psc=1  Just $15 new. 

Edited May 24, 2022 by PeterPan

[Miss Tick]

If your ds agrees with me that Sudoku isn't much more challenging than a Word Search, he should definitely try Ken Ken. I find it to be a nice half step up in challenge.

My girls had fun working some of The Cypher Files with their grandfather last Christmas break.

You could also look at the Intro books for Number Theory or Counting and Probability from AOPS. any easier version of the Counting and Probability material is James Tanton's Counting and Probability book in his middle school series.

[Shoes+Ships+SealingWax]

The books Myth & Magic In Wonderland / Camelot and The Number Devil would be fun! 

[Noreen Claire]

If they like chess, my 7th grader really enjoyed The Chess Mysteries of Sherlock Holmes: Fifty Tantalizing Problems of Chess Detection. It's retrograde chess analysis.

[SilverMoon]

So many fabulous options! Thank you! 🙂  He's the first kid to take to these so strongly and he wiped out the school closet. 😄

The only one we already had is Number Devil, which I was going to toss into his summer reading. 👍

(Math wise he's done with Beast and doing the big fat middle school math workbook for the summer. This fall he'll start AoPS prealg.)

[Shoes+Ships+SealingWax]

These will be familiar from the BA Logic chapter - there they were called “Truth-Tellers & Liars” puzzles. My DS loves them!

https://philosophy.hku.hk/think/logic/knights.php

[Farrar]

This is a link to some online Skyscrapers, but if you scroll down, this site has a ton of other puzzle types. They're great:

https://www.puzzle-skyscrapers.com/

I also recommend a subscription to Games Magazine just because it introduces a lot of different types of puzzles. A good number of are word puzzles, but certainly not all and a kid who is super into puzzles will find some new types to interest them.

Also, I teach a course at Aim Academy for middle school where we read about secret codes, practice solving secret codes, talk about historical mysteries, and do a puzzle contest. It's a fun course.