Downloadable Dinosaur Resources: A Cautionary Tale
For parents and guardians interested in homeschooling at their own expense, there are many downloadable teaching resources available to help with outlines and subsequent lesson plans. Making dinosaurs and prehistoric animals in general a teaching topic can be very rewarding, helping to motivate and excite students in math and science, as well as creative writing. However, homeschoolers should be careful when downloading dinosaur-themed resources to use in lessons, some of the materials have many bugs and errors.
When is Triceratops a Triceratops?
It is important to use accurate and correct teaching materials. It defeats the object of the exercise if the teaching aids 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 contained several errors. The Triceratops fact sheet, for example, explained what the name Triceratops means “three-horned face,” provided details on when this animal lived and how big it may have been, but the image of the dinosaur used to illustrate the fact sheet did not. it was that. of a Triceratops. The depicted dinosaur was a horned dinosaur, but it did not have two long horns on its eyebrows, it had a spiked frill. The image looked more like a centrasaurine like a Styracosaurus.
Spelling errors in teaching resources
Also, when the fact sheets were carefully examined, it was noted that there were a number of misspellings, the term Theropod used to classify part of Dinosauria was not spelled correctly. In the fact sheets that had been downloaded, this word was spelled “Therapod,” which is not helpful when working with enthusiastic and eager students who are also budding young paleontologists. Unfortunately, the teacher may not catch such errors, but it could be the children with their inherent knowledge of dinosaurs who point out the errors in the teaching aids.
Helping parents and guardians
It is essential that home educators have confidence in their homeschool teaching resources. Libraries can provide an extremely useful source of information and there are a number of support groups and other organizations that help thousands of home educators create and prepare lesson plans that can spark imaginations and really help children develop a lifelong love of learning. . With dinosaurs, children as young as three seem to act like sponges when it comes to picking up and absorbing prehistoric animal facts and figures. Students can spot 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 a home educator determines the validity of downloads. 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.