The importance of thinking in education has been gradually realized in recent years. Every student has the basic right to develop his or her minds and ability for thinking. Certain thinking habits and tendency will be formed in the early childhood. Therefore, we have good reasons to develop children's independent thinking and lead them to cultivate a good habit of thinking. We know that most schools place more emphasis on the outcomes of learning. In order to get a high score, they want the children to follow every step of teacher's instructions. Children's thinking skills and understanding ability have been ignored for a long time. We all know that successful learners not only have a good grasp of knowledge but also the ability of independent thinking. The aim of education is not get a high score in the exam but to develop a good habit of thinking and learning. That means we should value various ways of thinking and find proper methods to support children's cognitive skills and strategies, including creative thinking, critical thinking, and independent thinking, etc. This paper begins by providing a range of views and definitions about thinking. Though the discussion of different thinking skills, we conclude by giving suggestions on how we can teach for thinking in the primary classroom. There are four parts in this paper. The first part emphasizes the importance of different thinking skills. It reveals the relationship between learning and thinking. The development of critical thinking is also briefly introduced in this part. Part two explores the infused and stand-alone approaches to thinking. By comparing these two approaches, we find that it is more realistic and effective for us to teach thinking through different curriculum. Teach thinking is not an easy thing. Part three offers a brief description of challenges in implementing the thinking program in schools. Some effective teaching methods are suggested in part four to give us some guidance on how to teach thinking in primary classroom. Different strateg
