CC - Young Earth Creationist Dinosaur resources for Elementary (possibly open to some secular)

[abba12]

I'm not interested in debating creationism. For what it's worth I intend to do a thorough study of evolution in high school, because I believe when you hold a minority opinion you had better fully understand the majority one to know why you aren't following the majority. But I don't intend to introduce that until at least middle school.

 

So, the kids get to watch a documentary on youtube a couple of times a week. Eldest DD asked to watch a dinosaur documentary today. I went searching for a creationist one. But the ones I found aimed at children, by Ken Ham and Kent Hovind, all had this awful, arrogant attitude! Like 'look what these crazy people believe, how could anyone be so stupid as to believe in evolution' type attitude! And an 'of course this is right, this is definitely exactly what happened' when talking about things like whether dinosaurs were on the ark, a topic debated even among creationists! And the information they presented was all focused on why evolution was wrong and supposedly ridiculous, rather than simply being an introduction to dinosaurs from a creation perspective! I was particularly surprised and disappointed by this from Ken Ham. He's Australian, and we are close friends with two families who worked for the Creation Science organization. While I haven't met Ken myself, I know these friends are friends of his, and so I was quite taken aback by it. I'd always assumed I would use his resources when the time came, but now I'm definitely reconsidering that... Anyway, I digress, just feeling rather sad and let down by it all this evening. It feels a little too personal, seeing as he's the close friend of two close friends, like I've just seen the awful side of someone I kind of trusted, rather than just some person.

 

I have no interest in showing the kids documentaries focused on making fun of everyone else, or portraying evolution as a dumb and crazy theory. I disagree with evolution, but that doesn't mean the people who believe it are stupid, many are highly intelligent and simply reached different conclusions, in part because of a different founding theology/philosophy.

 

So, can anyone suggest YEC documentaries or books which simply present what we know about dinosaurs and things from a creation perspective? Or even discount evolution but in a tolerant and graceful 'this is what we believe' way? Alternatively, can anyone suggest secular resources which simply focus on dinosaurs without ecessive amounts of evolutionary theory being presented? 

Edited January 14, 2016 by abba12

[TracyP]

Check out this creation based dinosaur unit study from homeschool share. You might not be interested in the whole unit study, but if you scroll down there is a big list of books that you could look into. I did the unit study with my oldest ds 5 or 6 years ago, and we had a lot of fun. I don't remember specific books, but I assume those listed would meet your requests for the most part.

 

 

[Pen]

 

Alternatively, can anyone suggest secular resources which simply focus on dinosaurs without ecessive amounts of evolutionary theory being presented? 

 

 

My ds was "into" dinosaurs at one point, and none, not one, of his books (eta which were pretty much all secular except one which showed a human and dinosaur as if they coexisted in time) was focussed on evolutionary theory. At most you might have had to black out dates of when a particular one was supposed to have lived. Alas, those books were purged as part of trying to declutter, so I cannot give you titles, but kid books on dinosaurs we found seemed to focus on things like size, likely appearance, eating habits--as best as can be determined from teeth, etc. of particular ones.

 

 

 

 

eta: Have you actually tried some regular books about dinosaurs and found a problem?  I'd suggest maybe going to the kid books on dinosaurs at library section and finding ones that seem okay to you.   When my ds was interested, that is something we did, though just looking for what appealed since the evolution vs. creation issue was not a paramount consideration at the time.

Edited January 14, 2016 by Pen

[laughing lioness]

Reasons to Believe. Not young earth but definitely creationist and a humble, hard science based approach. 

[hollyhock]

You could try The Great Dinosaur Mystery and the Bible. I think it's by Paul Taylor. I don't recall anything like that in there.

[Farrar]

I'll bite my tongue at the debate and second what Pen said. My middle schoolers just finished up a long unit on dinosaurs and we looked at a lot of books and movies. The vast majority didn't talk directly about evolution. It's strongly implied but the focus in most resources we looked at for younger kids is more like "this is what they were like" - this big, this many teeth, this adaptation for eating, related to this other species, etc. The word "evolution" isn't in there. But I'm not watching with a creationist eye. I mean, if even the word "adaptation" is off limits, then, yeah, you might be in trouble. Or talking about extinction? I don't know. I doubt you'll find much that's particularly enlightening about dinosaurs without all the attitude in the YEC world, honestly.

[Dmmetler]

Dinosaur train mentions going through the "time tunnel" when they're looking at Jurassic vs Cretacious era, but I don't recall much focus on dates, or any mention of evolution. It's a cute show, includes quite a bit of focus on coming up with hypothesis and testing them, and I think past episodes are on Netflix. The actual dinosaur science content tends to be in the section at the very end. It's been several years since we were at that stage, but I think it would probably be compatible.

[Pen]

Dinosaur Discovery by Chris McGowan, a former curator of dinosaurs in a Canada museum, looks to me like it has little that would be an issue for YEC since it focusses, as I said many we saw do, on types of dinosaurs and things like bone structure and related.

 

Kingfisher's Everything You Need to Know About Dinosaurs has some time references you might want to redact, but also looks like a good secular source. I didn't see a ref. to evolution, but did not comb every word.

[Pen]

And an 'of course this is right, this is definitely exactly what happened' when talking about things like whether dinosaurs were on the ark, 

 

 

A school I know had the children pace out the length of the ark in cubits.

 

You could add pacing out the size of some of the larger dinosaurs and let your children decide for themselves about the fit