Thursday, October 15, 2009

Homeschool Science Free Printables and Lessons on Woolly Mammoths

Homeschool websites with free printables and educational online games about Woolly Mammoths are useful for early grade science lessons to coordinate with the news about the successful genome sequencing of the Woolly Mammoth.

Discovery Kids, National Geographic, and National Geographic for Kids are first-class resources for any science homeschool lesson. Discovery Education has a link with free lesson plans for almost every subject - including art, music, reading, grammar, spelling, poetry, social studies, geography, and more. They also have free printables and a worksheet generator for all grade levels on all school subjects.

Woolly MammothSnuggled within those educational links is a link for students on Woolly Mammoths, including a history, their migration path, and links to a couple of virtual Woolly Mammoth Museums.

Enchanted Learning, which has many free printables within their educational website, also has a page on Woolly Mammoths. It is a little dry, but it does contain links to some free printables on Woolly Mammoths, Elephants and Mammals. The website for the movie(s) Ice Age is probably a little more interesting for kids. The popular Zoo Tycoon game has an expansion pack for Extinct Animals that features the Woolly Mammoth, and the Zoo Tycoon 2 Extinct Animals Expansion Packis available at Amazon.

The Scienceschool.org article on Woolly Mammoth extinction brings to light the extinction debate. The Berkley University has a link to lesson plans (lengthy text articles) and information on Learning from Fossil Records, including a a lesson on Building a Topographic Model by Ellen Metzger.


Kidz World has a page on Woolly Mammoths and links on the Ice Age. They're more of a game website (typical stuff) than an educational website, but there are some useful educational links and tidbits. Dragoart.com is an online kids website with "how to draw" tutorials for kids. They have a "How to Draw a Woolly Mammoth" link with step-by-step text, graphic and video instructions, and if you scope around you'll find other links that can be used for homeschool lessons. (Think art, science and geometry in one easy lesson!)

My time is going to become extinct pretty soon so I have to cut this post short - but I'll be editing it and adding more links later. If you've come across any games or links that are useful for homeschoolers learning about Woolly Mammoths post a comment and let us know! I'm also very interested in finding websites with lesson for the early elementary years on genome sequencing. Our young children today will be facing a very different world tomorrow. The way things are going I can't help but wonder if the traditional "dissect a frog" class (which I won't be doing!) is going to be replaced with a "clone a frog" class in the future - and every kid can take home their own cloned pet frog. Our kids' kids will look back on us and say "you mean you actually had to CATCH a frog? Why didn't you just clone it?" Cloning Woolly Mammoths might be a little too large to handle for the average homeschool family - but hey - we are an ingenious bunch.

Post Script November 24th: I found this Search Engine for Kids link on Digg called Kigose, and I did a search for "woolly mammoth" and there were excellent educational links listed. This is a search engine worth looking into for homeschool lessons plans and probably worksheets and games too! (Someday I'll get my search engine for homeschool resources up and going on this blog!) There was also a link to Top Ten Biology Videos from the Wired tech website, including one on high speed genome sequencing - videos are such a great way to get a lesson through the brain fast.

The Woolly Mammoth picture is from the artist's page on Clip Art.org -he also has a "fundraw" website where you can incorporate art and products. I haven't looked into it, but there may be some interesting gift ideas in there!

For more Free Printables, Homeschool Worksheets and Free Lesson Plans, go to Homeschool Websites Homepage

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