Northwest Treasures Review

My girls are currently into dinosaurs and we were excited to have the opportunity to try out their new curriculum as a summer school unit. This one is by Northwest Treasures and we used the Dinosaurs and the Bible course. You can see all of their available course here http://northwestrockandfossil.org/index.php?route=product/category&path=90. Northwest Treasures offers online classes in geology, rock, mineral and fossil kits for grades prek to 12, so be sure to click the link above and see all the different ones they offer. We also tried out their introductory video Taking the Mystery out of Geology. They also offer some physical courses which we would love to try. You can check them out here the high school level Nothewest Treasures Curriculum Project, and the PreK-3rd grade Geology for "Little Eyes". 

The introductory class called Taking the Mystery out of Geology is a shorter 20-minute class that introduces you to geology from a Biblical perspective. The price is only $5.00 and it teaches students 13 different terms that help them to clarify what geology is. It teaches how the Flood and the Ice Age came together and even talks about some of the problems with evolutionary thinking. It is geared for grades 5+. I felt that was an accurate grade level recommendation. Some of it was a little too much for my 3rd grader to grasp. 

The second class we took was the Dinosaurs and the Bible course. Pricing is about $19.99 and you get access to the videos through Vimeo for 6 months. We found 6 video lessons in the dinosaur course. Each video varies in length anywhere from 11 min to 21 minutes. So they are not crazy long but they have a lot of information in each video. The course includes some worksheets that go with each lesson answer keys are included. Now access to the worksheets is a little odd. When you go into Vimeo you go to your library and access the courses. Then you click on the video say lesson 1 so that it brings up the video details. Then in the video details, it will have two links you can click one for the worksheet and one for the answer key. Both will open in dropbox. Once you know this is how you find the worksheets they are easy to pull up. We found 6 lessons with corresponding worksheets in this course.

The Lessons included in the course we reviewed are:

Lesson 1: How We Got Our Modern View of Dinosaurs

Lesson 2: The Classification of Dinosaurs

Lesson 3: Dinosaurs and the Bible, The Great Dinosaur Rush

Lesson 4: The Extinction of the Dinosaurs

Lesson 5: Dinosaurs and the Ice Age

Lesson 6: Fossils, Age, and Soft Tissue

I felt like the videos covered a good amount of information and to the best of my knowledge, they were accurate. I really like that this covers dinosaurs from a Biblical perspective.  So many things you find online and at the library cover dinosaurs from an evolutionary perspective. It was nice to have something that supported our beliefs. The girls have enjoyed the videos they kept their attention and got them thinking and coming up with more questions. I pre-printed the worksheets for the girls so that they could fill them out as they watched the video. We liked the printable worksheets. I always feel like worksheets help to reinforce what they watched or listened to and it gives us something to put in our portfolio to show what we have been learning about.  Out of all 6 lessons the girls enjoyed the Classification of dinosaurs the most. They ended up pulling out their plastic dinosaur collection so they could try to classify them into the different groups. 

All in all, if you are looking for a great semester dinosaur study this one might be just for you. It doesn't require a ton of teacher involvement since it comes with the videos and printables. It would be perfect for a summer course. Northwest Treasures offers some other courses so be sure to check out their website and see what they are all about. Click the Crew Review Banner below to read some of the other crew reviews. We all have kids of different ages and abilities so give them a read. Don't forget to like and follow Northwest Treasures on social media.

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