Fossils-Facts-And-Finds-Ezine

Table of Contents

• HOLIDAY FOSSIL DEAL 40% Discount
• Featured Articles
  • Getting to Know Rocks and Minerals
  • Teaching History: The Big Picture #4 The Timeline of Writing
• What’s New at www.fossilicious.com
• Fossil News
  • Sabertooth Cats Were Social
  • New Discovery of Bird-like Dinosaur
  • Who survived the Permian Extinction?

• Work in Progress

Don’t miss a single issue: Whitelist us NOW!

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Holiday Fossil Deal 40% Discount

It's Black Friday and we can't help but think of all those people losing sleep, standing in lines and trying to save a few precious dollars while driving here and there. Too bad they aren't all fossil lovers! They could be quietly shopping from the comfort of their home and saving money, too!

At fossilicious, we want to say thank you to our VIP members and loyal customers by giving you all a great holiday sale. From now through December 31, we'll give a whopping 30% off any order to our ezine subscribers. You simply have to enter the code holiday08 in the box at the bottom of the check out page.

If you are a VIP member you automatically receive an additional 10% discount. That gives you a full 40% savings on your orders this holiday season.

You must be logged in as a VIP member to take advantage of Your VIP status

What do you have to do to become a VIP at Fossilicious?

It's easy and it's Free! Just sign up! Look for the VIP Registration link at the left of this Page It takes about a day for us to process your status. To prevent spammers from abusing the system, it does not process automatically.

If you are not sure if you are a VIP member, log in and check your profile. The log in link is at the top of the page. At the top of the section that says user name and password is a little box that says sign up for membership. Make sure it says VIP Members. If it does you are already set up for your discount. If not, change it and click the submit button at the bottom of the page.

This is our way of saying thank you to those of you who come back to Fossilicious.com again and again.

Featured Article

Getting to Know Rocks and Minerals: A Complete Curriculum for the Study of Rocks and Minerals

It's finally here! We've been writing that it was on its way, but now Getting to Know Rocks and Minerals: A Complete Curriculum for the Study of Rocks and Minerals is finished and ready for shipment.

A frustration that we experienced in our early teaching years was purchasing rock and mineral collections that offered few or no suggestions for use. We loved the idea of a study of rocks and minerals because our students were into it, and we shared their excitement, but we weren't geologists and were not prepared to teach much about the beautiful specimens. We ended up with boxes of rocks and minerals that had given our students little more than the enjoyment of looking at the “pretty rocks.” Sometimes this meant that precious budget money had been spent uselessly.

The more we learned about the mysteries of our planet, the more we knew that teachers would benefit from a curriculum that could be easily implemented in their classrooms without a lot of extra personal investigations. Teachers who can learn along with their students have the distinct advantage of sharing the wonder of their subject. With Getting to Know Rocks and Minerals, you needn't worry that you aren't very familiar with geology or earth science. Everything you'll need, including background information is at your fingertips!

The curriculum contains more than 50 lessons that span activities appropriate for children as young as 3 or 4 through middle or high school beginning earth science. Lesson plans include background information for the teacher, outline goals for each lesson and cover the following earth science topics:

• layers of the earth
• plate tectonics
• weather and weathering
• the rock cycle
• degrees of metamorphism
• volcanoes
• properties of minerals.

Lessons for younger students involve matching, grading and learning the characteristics of the particular rocks and minerals through simple exercises that can be mastered by even very young rock hounds.

All the lab sheets and materials to accompany the lessons have been designed for you. The e-book is available as a download so everything: lab sheets, charts, graphs, and shelf-ready materials, will live right on your desktop until you are ready to print them off and put them to use.

You'll receive updates and additions to the curriculum as they are completed, for as long as we have your email address. You just can't go wrong with this material. You can purchase the curriculum on its own or as part of a collection that includes 60 rock and mineral specimens to accompany the lessons. Here’s what you get:

• Two each of 5 igneous rocks
• Two each of 5 sedimentary rocks
• Two each of 5 metamorphic rocks
• Two each of 15 minerals

The 60 specimens come packed 2 to a bag with an information card describing the formation and characteristics. One specimen is labeled with a letter and number to match the information card, while the other has no label, allowing students to test their identification skills gradually.

As with all our products, shipping is free-an important feature when you're buying rocks!

Follow this link to see all of our new Rock and Mineral Collections

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The Timeline of Writing

Did you miss any of the first three installments of our featured article, Teaching History's Big Picture? Click here to read Teaching History's Big Picture Parts 1, 2, 3 and 4

The following is the fifth of a series of articles on teaching history based on Montessori methods. Our next issue will cover the remaining Great Lesson, The Timeline of Mathmatics.

The Great Lessons are the 5-part story of the entire history of our planet up to the present. After her extensive observations of children and her analyses of how human thought unfolds, Maria Montessori developed her method of providing the whole concept first, then allowing the child to unravel the pieces to create meaningful understanding in her own thought process.

Not only does this provide inspiration for investigation, it responds to the spontaneous nature of children. The elements of the story that sparked their curiosity and enthusiasm, now spur them on to study. It’s a far cry for the teacher-directed approach that made many a student balk and feel that their education had little meaning.

The Timeline of Writing

The history of how the earth was formed and came to be inhabited by all manner of plants, animals and, finally, humans, now begins to explore our human-ness: our problem-solving, thinking brains and our ability to communicate.

The Timeline of Writing tells the story of how humans began to set down their ideas for others to experience. Progressing from cave painting through picture writing to symbolic expressions of thought, this timeline covers not only the actual writing techniques that developed along the path of history, but also the inventions that supported it.

Children hear how the Phonecian system of written communication was passed to the Greeks through their extensive trading, how the Egyptians and Chinese developed paper from the plants available to them, and how the painstaking copying of texts was too slow to provide enough books to satisfy the peoples’ thirst for knowledge that led to the Gutenberg printing press, the newspaper printing press and, finally, the computer.

With this story, children are inspired to join the march of history by becoming writers themselves. They see writing as a gift to telling the stories that are important to them. The need to write takes on new importance and can be used when the tedious formation of letters, words, sentences and paragraphs becomes overwhelming. I’ve seen the story itself become the vehicle for written communication when a student realizes that The Timeline of Writing is the important story to be written down and shared.

For more information about this and other variations of the Great Lessons, contact claudiamann at fossilicious.com.

The details of the “Timeline of Writing”

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What's New at Fossilicious.com

• Dinosaur Egg Shells
  

  Look at all these new Rock and Mineral Collections!,

• Rock and Mineral Collections

Coming Soon! look for Tibetan Salt Lamps

Fossil News

Sabertooth Cats Were Social

New Study Suggests Prehistoric Cats Were Social Animals

Who survived the Permian Extinction?

Surviving the Permian-Triassic Extinction

New Discovery of Bird-like Dinosaur

Bird-Like Dinosaur Sat On Eggs

Work in Progress

The Fossil Coloring E-Book will likely be ready by soon.

This coloring book will be full size 8 ½ x 11 in a pdf format. It will include scenes from all the various geologic times: Precambrian time through the Quaternary period. We are sorting through hundreds of drawings of original artwork used in illustrating our children's books. For a taste of this fossil coloring book follow this link. downloadable coloring Pages

Is there something you would like to see offered on www.fossilicious.com or www.fossils.facts-and-finds.com? Drop us a note: dougmann at fossilicious.com or claudiamann at fossilicious.com

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Written by….Doug and Claudia Mann
© copyright 2006/2007 by www.fossils-facts-and-finds.com