Fascinating Facts Every Kid Should Know

The world is a big, wonderful, inexhaustibly weird place.
Curious kids will devour 5,000 Awesome Facts (About Everything) 2, filled with color photos and weird tidbits of counterintuitive, unexpected, and just plain odd information, from revelations on ice cream (you can order eel flavor in Japan!), to outdated folk beliefs (people once thought kissing a donkey could cure a toothache), to the surprising information that apes are susceptible to tickling (they can’t help but laugh).

A curious mind can unlock anything.
When Bill Bryson says “everything,” he really means it, and in his A Really Short History of Nearly Everything, he starts at the beginning of time and goes from there. From revealing that our bodies share atoms with Shakespeare’s, to telling us that the amount of pent-up energy in our bodies matches that of several hydrogen bombs, this book doesn’t disappoint in its effort to teach you everything under (and around) the sun.

Real life can be just as strange as fiction.
Weird and wonderful things don’t just happen in books. My Weird But True Fact a Day Fun Journal offers kids a daily oddball fact, while giving them space to record their own. Inspire a kid to examine his or her life a little more closely, and to find the weird magic in the everyday.

Humans keep getting better.
While Scholastic’s world records include outstanding oddities from the natural world, perhaps its most interesting revelations are found in the pages devoted to what people can do. In the latest volume, Scholastic Book of World Records 2015, young readers can explore the records extraordinary humans have set in speed, endurance, and other more…specific categories (such as: longest duration living with scorpions, most spoons balanced on the face, fastest time climbing into a suitcase…).

It’s important to speak your mind, even when doing so is scary.
Perhaps today’s most well-known education activist is a teenaged girl: Malala Yousafzai. At age 15, the Pakistani student was shot by a Taliban gunman at point-blank range for pushing back against an edict that barred women and girls from attending school. The shooting only steeled her resolve to fight for education rights, a battle that helped lead to the signing of Pakistan’s first Right to Education bill. Learn her whole story in I Am Malala, now available in a young readers’ edition.

Huge achievements start with one small action.
In 2011, Aussie pop band 5 Seconds of Summer was formed. Its four members started out as YouTube stars, gaining a massive following with their punk-edged covers of hit songs. Everything changed for them in 2013, when mega boy band One Direction invited them to support their upcoming world tour…and later that year, the 5SoS boys signed to Capital Records. For a young bookworm who dreams of making it as an entertainer, their story, Hey Let’s Make a Band, offers an inspiring blueprint, proving that sometimes you have to kickstart your life yourself, rather than waiting for other people to make it happen.

You’ll never know what you’re truly capable of until the going gets tough.
For a kid who needs perspective on that bad day at school, or who just loves a thrilling read, Lauren Tarshis’s I Survived True Stories is a must-read. It details five heart-stopping stories of survival, focusing specifically on kids in the midst of large-scale disasters—from the Children’s Blizzard of 1888, which trapped students inside one-room schoolhouses, to the deadly tornado that ripped through Henryville, Indiana, just two years ago.

We share our planet with an amazing range of other species.
…and 2,500 of them can be found in the National Geographic Animal Encyclopedia, a gorgeous book bursting with color photography and fun facts on animals from around the world. The book is organized by taxonomy for kids who really want to be in the know, and the text offers in-depth info on habitat, diet, and more. Special features including field reports from National Geographic explorers round out this indispensable volume for wildlife lovers.

The world has more wild stories than the beach has grains of sand.
In the National Geographic Kids Almanac, young readers will find incredible facts on everything from how to survive life-or-death situations to the ways food manufacturers get consumers hooked on their snacks. It’s organized into categories including Wonders of Nature, Awesome Adventure, and Geography Rocks, and supplemented with craft ideas, color photos, games and activities, and weird-but-true facts made for quoting on long car rides.

If you want to know something for sure, you’ve got to find it out for yourself.
Sometimes inherited wisdom—those “facts” we’ve heard repeated again and again, until we assume they must be true—ends up not being so wise after all. In True or False?, the assumptions we have about the world are questioned, and either proven or debunked. Is the human body really 75% water? Was Popeye right: does spinach really make you stronger? If your favorite kid likes to dig a little deeper to discover the truth for themselves (and if they love busting myths just as much), then this is the perfect handbook.
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