Wow Facts

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Plants

You can tell how old a tree is by counting the rings inside its trunk.

🦒 Animals

15 facts

Elephants are the biggest animals that live on land.
A baby kangaroo is called a joey.
Polar bears have black skin under their white fur.
Sloths move so slowly that tiny green plants called algae can grow in their fur.
A group of lions is called a pride.
Cheetahs are the fastest runners of all land animals.
Owls can turn their heads much farther around than people can.
A hummingbird can fly backwards.
Penguins are birds, but they cannot fly. They use their wings to swim.
Every zebra has its own pattern of stripes.
A beaver's front teeth never stop growing. Chewing wood keeps them short.
Bats are the only mammals that can really fly.
A camel's hump stores fat, not water.
A giraffe's tongue is longer than a school ruler.
Moose are great swimmers and can dive under water to eat plants.

🐙 Ocean

15 facts

An octopus has three hearts.
An octopus has blue blood.
The blue whale is the biggest animal that has ever lived.
A sea star is not a fish. It can grow back a lost arm.
Seahorse dads carry the babies until they hatch.
Most of Earth is covered by ocean.
Dolphins breathe air through a blowhole on top of their heads.
A shark has no bones. Its skeleton is made of the same bendy stuff as your ears.
Jellyfish do not have a brain.
Sea otters sometimes hold paws while they rest so they do not float apart.
Clownfish live safely among the stinging arms of sea anemones.
Some deep sea animals can glow in the dark ocean.
Most crabs walk sideways.
A narwhal's long tusk is really a tooth.
Humpback whales sing long songs under the sea.

🚀 Space

15 facts

The Sun is a star.
Earth spins around once every day.
It takes Earth about one year to travel all the way around the Sun.
The Moon has no air, so astronauts wear space suits there.
Footprints on the Moon can stay for a very long time because there is no wind.
Jupiter is the biggest planet in our solar system.
Saturn's rings are made of ice and rock.
Mars looks red because its dust is rusty.
There are eight planets in our solar system.
Venus is the hottest planet, even though Mercury is closer to the Sun.
Sunlight takes about eight minutes to reach Earth.
The Moon does not make its own light. It shines with light from the Sun.
Astronauts on the space station sleep in sleeping bags tied to the wall.
A day on Venus is longer than a year on Venus.
More than one million Earths could fit inside the Sun.

🫀 My Body

15 facts

Your heart is about the size of your fist.
Grown ups have 206 bones. Babies have more, and some join together as they grow.
The smallest bone in your body is inside your ear.
Your skin is the biggest part of your body.
Nobody else in the world has fingerprints just like yours.
You are a tiny bit taller in the morning than at bedtime.
Kids have 20 baby teeth.
Your heart beats about one hundred thousand times every day.
Your body has more than 600 muscles.
Your thigh bone is the longest bone in your body.
Your left lung is a little smaller to make room for your heart.
Your hair and your nails are made of the same stuff.
Your brain keeps working even while you sleep.
Your eyes almost always close when you sneeze.
You blink many times every minute without even thinking about it.

🌻 Plants

15 facts

Plants make their own food using sunlight, water and air.
Plants give off oxygen, the part of the air we need to breathe.
Young sunflowers turn to follow the Sun across the sky.
Bamboo is a kind of grass. Some bamboo can grow almost a metre in one day.
You can tell how old a tree is by counting the rings inside its trunk.
Strawberries wear their seeds on the outside.
Bananas grow in bunches that point up toward the sky.
Coast redwood trees can grow taller than a 30 storey building.
Maple syrup is made from the sap of maple trees.
A cactus stores water inside its thick stem.
A pumpkin is a fruit, because it has seeds inside.
A Venus flytrap is a plant that can catch insects.
Dandelion seeds float away on the wind with tiny parachutes.
Peanuts grow under the ground.
Apples float in water because they are partly filled with air.

⛈️ Weather

15 facts

Lightning is hotter than the outside of the Sun.
You see lightning before you hear thunder because light travels faster than sound.
Count the seconds between lightning and thunder. Every 3 seconds is about one kilometre away.
Snowflakes usually have six sides or six arms.
A rainbow appears when sunlight shines through raindrops.
To see a rainbow, the Sun has to be behind you.
Clouds are made of tiny drops of water or tiny bits of ice.
Wind is air that is moving.
Fog is a cloud that is down near the ground.
Hail is balls of ice that fall from big storm clouds.
Small raindrops are round, not shaped like teardrops.
A tornado is a spinning tube of air that reaches down from a storm cloud.
Dew is water that forms on cool grass during the night.
Frost is ice that forms on cold surfaces like windows and grass.
The middle of a hurricane, called the eye, is calm.

🐞 Bugs

15 facts

Insects have six legs.
Spiders have eight legs, so they are not insects.
Ladybugs eat aphids, tiny bugs that hurt plants.
Butterflies taste with their feet.
Bees make honey from nectar they collect from flowers.
Honeybees do a waggle dance to tell other bees where to find flowers.
Bees have five eyes.
Ants can carry things much heavier than their own bodies.
Fireflies make their own light.
Insects were flying around long before the dinosaurs.
A caterpillar turns into a butterfly inside a case called a chrysalis.
Crickets hear with ears on their front legs.
Only mother mosquitoes bite.
Monarch butterflies fly all the way from Canada to Mexico each fall.
Spider silk is very strong for how thin it is.

🦕 Dinosaurs

15 facts

Dinosaurs lived millions of years ago, long before people.
Birds are living relatives of dinosaurs.
T. rex had tiny arms but a huge, strong bite.
Some dinosaurs had feathers.
Stegosaurus had big plates on its back and spikes on its tail.
Triceratops means three horned face.
Dinosaurs hatched from eggs.
Scientists who study dinosaur fossils are called palaeontologists.
Some dinosaurs, like Argentinosaurus, were longer than two school buses.
Some dinosaurs were only about the size of a chicken.
Lots of dinosaur fossils have been found in Alberta, Canada.
Ankylosaurus had a bony club at the end of its tail.
Velociraptor was about the size of a turkey.
Pterosaurs could fly, but they were not dinosaurs.
A giant space rock hit Earth about 66 million years ago, and most dinosaurs died out.

Time for a joke

For grown ups

There are 120 short facts for ages 4 to 10, written simply and checked for accuracy. A fun follow up: ask your child to tell the fact back to you in their own words.