Downloadable Dinosaur Resources a Cautionary Tale
For parents and guardians keen to home school their charges there are lots of downloadable teaching resources available to assist them with schemes of work and subsequent lesson plans. Making dinosaurs and prehistoric animals in general a teaching topic can bring a lot of rewards, helping to motivate and enthuse students in mathematics and science as well as in creative writing. However, home schoolers need to be careful when downloading dinosaur themed resources for use in lessons, some of the materials have many mistakes 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 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 a number of errors. The Triceratops fact sheet for instance, explained what the name Triceratops means “three-horned face”, it provided details about when this animal lived and how big it may have been but the picture of the dinosaur used to illustrate the fact sheet was not that of a Triceratops. The dinosaur depicted was a horned dinosaur but it did not have two long brow horns, it did possess a frill of spikes. The image was more closely resembling a Centrosaurine such as a Styracosaurus.
Spelling Mistakes in Teaching Resources
In addition, when the fact sheets were closely examined, it was noticed that there were a number of spelling errors, the term Theropod used to classify part of the Dinosauria was not spelt correctly. On the fact sheets that had been downloaded this word was spelt “Therapod”, not helpful when working with keen and eager students who are also budding young palaeontologists. Unfortunately, such errors may not be spotted by the teacher but it might be the children with their inherent knowledge of the dinosaurs that point out the errors in the teaching resources.
Helping Parents and Guardians
It is essential that home schoolers have confidence in their home schooling teaching resources. Libraries can provide a source of extremely helpful information and there are a number of support groups and other organisations who help the many thousands of home schoolers to create and prepare lesson plans that can fire imaginations and really help children to develop a life long love of learning. With dinosaurs, children as young as three years of age seem to act like sponges when it comes to picking up and absorbing prehistoric animal facts and figures. Any mistakes in the teaching materials may get spotted by the pupils and this would undermine the lesson being taught.
It is essential that the teachers have confidence in their teaching resources, but with a lack of knowledge concerning the Dinosauria, the problem is how does a home schooler determine the validity of any downloads? Testimonials from other users and recommendations are a good place to start, as is choosing to download materials from a long-established web site that demonstrates knowledge in this specialised subject area.
