Downloadable Dinosaur Resources A Cautionary Tale
For parents and guardians interested in homeschooling their children, there are many downloadable instructional resources available to assist with post-lesson plans and work plans. Making dinosaurs and prehistoric animals in general a teaching subject can bring many rewards, helping to motivate and excite students in math and science, as well as creative writing. However, homeschoolers need to be careful when downloading dinosaur-themed resources to use for lessons, some of the materials have a lot of mistakes and errors.
When is Triceratops a Triceratops?
It is important to use accurate and correct teaching materials. Defeat the object of the exercise if the teaching resources are misleading and inaccurate. For example, our team members, during one of their many school visits to teach about dinosaurs and fossils, came across some fact sheets that had been downloaded, but these downloads had several errors. The Triceratops fact sheet, for example, explained what the name Triceratops means “three-horned face,” provides details on when this animal lived and how large it may have been, but the image of the dinosaur used to illustrate the sheet of data was not that great. of a Triceratops. The dinosaur represented was a horned dinosaur, but it did not have two long horns on its forehead, it had a spiked steering wheel. The image looked more like a Centrosaurine like a Styracosaurus.
Spelling errors in teaching resources
Also, when the data sheets were examined closely, it was noted that there were a number of spelling errors, the term Theropod used to classify part of Dinosauria was not spelled correctly. In the data sheets that had been downloaded, this word was spelled “Therapod”, which is not useful when working with enthusiastic and eager students who are also young budding paleontologists. Unfortunately, these errors may not be detected by the teacher, but it may be the children with their inherent knowledge of dinosaurs who point out the errors in the teaching resources.
Helping Parents and Guardians
It is essential that homeschoolers have confidence in homeschooling teaching resources. Libraries can provide an extremely useful source of information and there are a number of support groups and other organizations that help the thousands of homeschoolers create and prepare lesson plans that can spark the imagination and really help children to develop a love for lifelong learning. . With dinosaurs, children as young as three seem to act like sponges when it comes to capturing and absorbing facts and figures about prehistoric animals. Students can detect any errors in the teaching materials and this would undermine the lesson being taught.
It is essential that teachers have confidence in their teaching resources, but with the lack of knowledge about Dinosauria, the problem is how does a homeschooler determine the validity of any download? User testimonials and recommendations are a good place to start, as is choosing to download materials from a long-established website that demonstrates knowledge in this specialized subject area.