Interest Your Kids about Dinosaurs with a Correct Approach
There would hardly be any kid (and even adult) who is not fascinated by dinosaurs. If you want your kid to take interest in subjects like all sciences, biology and evolution, dinosaurs offer a great opportunity. Unfortunately, our standard educational resources don’t justify the topic and the possibilities it offers. However, by virtue of the worldwide web, you can now teach and learn more about the ancient giants. There are countless dinosaur pictures and facts available on the internet which will amaze you and your kids.
How will You Teach Paleontology to Your Kids?
Don’t Go into Statistics, but Concepts: If you tell figures of dinosaurs’ height, weight and length to your kids, they may be fascinated to start with, but once they digest the concept of their huge size, they might be bored with figures. Instead, stress upon the concepts like:
- Dinosaurs’ bodily and behavioral characteristics to safeguard them from predators, like huge size, living in groups, body armor, etc
- Food chain
- Ecological niches, like diet, adaptations, etc
- How paleontologists can find behaviors of dinosaurs from their fossils
- Parental care
Comparison of Dinosaurs with Their Current Counterparts: By comparing today’s animal with the extinct animal, you can make the kids understand the ancient animal better, e.g. Pterosaur and Pelican. You can even encourage children to think about the more expansive evolutionary connotations. Do you think that your children are too young to understand this? Experiments show that children as young as 4 can grasp analogies.
Stick to the Topic: Books you will give to your kids about dinosaurs should be about dinosaurs only, and not about history of paleontology or a paleontologist’s biography. It doesn’t mean that these topics are not right for them. But they are not relevant. When the children are eager to know about the animals themselves, you should not hand over information of a concerned man or something else to them.
Prefer Understandable Explanations and Avoid Complexities: While making them understand a topic, you should choose an explanation which they can understand and avoid complexities.
Good Illustrations are Immensely Important: While choosing dinosaurs’ pictures, what you should look for is not only how good they have been drawn, but the ecological context in the picture. Some pictures show the dinosaurs on a neutral background. It is important that the environment and habitat is seen in the picture wherein the animals lived. If the pictures on neutral background, they should show their size in comparison to man or some other subject and that can amuse kids. DinosaurPictures.org has extremely useful and beautiful dinosaur pictures explaining the habitat and behavior of the animals along with their size and bodily features. Some of them have been given in this article and you can see many more on the website.
Take Children to Museums: If you take kids to museums of fossils they will better understand how scientists found that a particular dinosaur had feathers and the other had scales and some other gave birth to a young, and so on.
So, you can interest the children about the ancient creatures and develop a liking in them about the topic; what you need is a correct approach.
