100 Fun and Educational Facts for Kids

Fun facts are like tiny fireworks: They light up your child’s imagination and creativity! They’re also a great introduction to a wide variety of subjects and can inspire curiosity, support critical thinking skills, and build a foundation of learning.

Share these 100 fun and educational facts with kids anywhere and any time: at the dinner table, before bed, or during bath time! And when one (or two or twelve!) captures your child’s attention, you can encourage them to dive deeper and learn more.

Table of Contents

• Ocean Facts for Kids
• Sports Facts for Kids
• Insect Facts for Kids
• Space Facts for Kids
• Math Facts for Kids
• History Facts for Kids
• Human Body Facts for Kids
• Place Facts for Kids
• Food Facts for Kids
• Animal Facts for Kids

100 Fun Facts for Kids

Ocean Facts for Kids

• The ocean covers 71% of the Earth’s surface.
• Ocean currents regulate the Earth’s climate by circulating heat and moisture.
• 50 people could stand on a blue whale’s tongue.
• 2.2 million species of animals live in the ocean.
• Turtles date back to the time of dinosaurs.
• Humpback whales sing loud, complicated songs that last up to 30 minutes.
• Because of their powerful tails, great white sharks can travel through the water at over 37 miles per hour.
• Killer whales are called “wolves of the sea” because they hunt in packs like wolves.
• A female seahorse lays her eggs (sometimes more than 100!) in a male seahorse’s “brood pouch” on his belly. He carries them for up to 45 days before they hatch.
• Jellyfish have no brain, heart, bones, or eyes.

Sports Facts for Kids

• The Olympic Torch Relay is a tradition where runners take turns carrying the Olympic torch from Greece to the host city of the Olympics.
• Instead of gold medals, first-place Olympic winners used to be awarded a silver medal and an olive branch.
• Between 1900 and 1920, tug-of-war was an Olympic event.
• There are only 18 minutes of action in a typical Major League Baseball game.
• The largest bowling alley in the world is in Japan. It could fit about five regular-sized bowling alleys inside!
• The famous basketball player Michael Jordan didn’t make his high school basketball team until his junior year.
• To date, the world record for the most nonstop push-ups is 10,507, set by Minoru Yoshida of Japan in 1980.
• Frozen cow poop was the first “puck” used in an ice hockey game.
• When basketball was first invented, players used peach baskets and soccer balls.
• Toe wrestling is a competitive sport, with a championship held each year in England.

Insect Facts for Kids

• Ladybugs can be red or blue.
• Ladybugs play dead to avoid predators.
• Fruit flies were the first living creatures to be sent into space.
• Butterflies taste with their feet.
• Caterpillars have 12 eyes.
• Bulldog ants can leap seven times the length of their bodies, which are around one inch long.
• Grasshoppers were on Earth before dinosaurs.
• Houseflies’ feet are 10 million times more “taste sensitive” than human tongues.
• Honeybees make 10 million trips to collect nectar to make one pound of honey.
• Crickets hear through their knees with a unique organ called a tympanum.

Space Facts for Kids

• One million Earths could fit inside the sun.
• An asteroid the size of a car enters Earth’s atmosphere about once a year, but burns up before it reaches us.
• The moon is actually shaped like a lemon.
• A whole year on the planet Mercury is shorter than one day on Earth.
• Pluto hasn’t even completed one full orbit around the sun since humans discovered it. (It was discovered in 1930 and takes 248 years to orbit!)
• There’s no sound in space. It’s completely silent!
• Because Saturn is made mostly of the gases helium and hydrogen, it could float in water.
• The moon is slowly drifting away from the Earth.
• Venus spins in the opposite direction of every other planet.

Math Facts for Kids

• Almost every star we see in the sky has a planet around it.In a room of 23 people, there’s a 50% chance that two people have the same birthday.
• “Jiffy” is a real unit of time: 1/100th of a second.
• A baseball diamond is a perfect rhombus.
• Cheetahs can run up to 76 miles per hour.
• A year isn’t quite 365 days. It’s actually 365.2564 days!
• Mathematical symbols weren’t invented until the 16th century. Before that, every math problem had to be written using words.
• The only number with its letters in alphabetical order is forty.
• Every odd number has the letter e in it.
• A Baker’s Dozen is 13, not 12. This comes from medieval England, when it was against the law to give customers different-sized loaves of bread. In order to avoid breaking the law, bakers threw in an extra loaf of bread.
• Most soccer balls are made of 12 pentagons and 20 hexagons.

History Facts for Kids

• Ketchup was once sold as medicine.
• Abraham Lincoln stored important papers in his tall black hat.
• The Leaning Tower of Pisa in Italy never stood up straight. As it was being built, it began to lean.
• People once used corncobs instead of toilet paper. They were soft, easy to hold, and there were a lot of them!
• An 11-year-old boy named Frank Epperson invented the ice pop, later to be called a Popsicle®. He left a cup of soda with a wooden stirrer in it outside and it froze!
• The Statue of Liberty was first created as a lighthouse.
• The largest dinosaurs were vegetarians.
• The Romans used to eat with their hands while lying down. (They never used a fork or knife, but sometimes would use a spoon.)
• In 1957, the Soviet Union sent the first living creature into space: a dog named Laika.
• In 1850, the famous nurse Florence Nightingale rescued an owl and carried it in her pocket when she went to sick people’s houses.

Human Body Facts for Kids

• Our eyes process more than 120 million bits of information per second.
• A quarter of our bones are in our feet.
• Hair grows faster in warm weather.
• Your mouth produces over four cups of saliva every day.
• The word muscle comes from a Latin term meaning “little mouse“ because Ancient Romans thought flexed bicep muscles looked like mice!
• Human teeth are as strong as shark teeth.
• Human noses can recognize a trillion different scents.
• The average person has 67 different kinds of bacteria living in their belly button.
• Just like fingerprints, every single tongue has a different pattern.
• Muscles always work in pairs. When one contracts, another relaxes.

Place Facts for Kids

• The national animal of the United States is the American bison.
• The Missouri River is 2,341 miles long, making it the longest river in the U.S.
• The Nile River is the longest in the world, spanning over 4,100 miles.
• The place with the longest one-word name is in New Zealand and is Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateaturipukakapikimaungahoronukupokaiwhenuakitanatahu.
• Earth isn’t the only planet that has volcanoes. Other planets and moons have them, and the largest volcano in our solar system is Olympus Mons, which is on Mars.
• The floor of the Amazon (the largest rainforest in the world) has so many trees that it takes about 10 minutes for rain to reach the ground when it falls.
• Because of Earth’s tilt, the Arctic has one full day of darkness and one full day of light each year.
• The Philippines has more than 7,600 islands.
• Africa is the only continent that sits in all four hemispheres.
• It snows in the Sahara Desert. Not a lot, but sometimes!

Food Facts for Kids

• Peanut butter can be made into a diamond gem.
• You can fry an egg on a hot sidewalk (when it reaches 158°F).
• Applesauce was the first food eaten in space by an astronaut.
• Raspberries are part of the rose family.
• Cucumbers are 95% water.
• Rhubarb grows so fast, you can sometimes hear a creaking sound as its buds open.
• Fruit-salad trees can grow up to eight different fruits at a time.
• Lemons float, but limes sink. This is because lemons are less dense than water, and limes are denser.
• The first oranges, which came from Southeast Asia, were green, not orange.
• Food tastes different when you’re on an airplane because altitude changes your body chemistry and makes it a bit harder to detect tastes.

Animal Facts for Kids

• The bumblebee bat is the lightest mammal on the planet, weighing only as much as two M&M’s®.
• Fleas are so small they can fit on the head of a pin, and they can jump up 100 times their body length. That’s like a kid jumping more than 1,000 feet in the air!
• A snail moving nonstop takes about 220 hours to travel a mile.
• Dogs can only sweat through their paws. They have to pant to cool down.
• Rabbits purr like cats when they’re happy.
• There are three species of vampire bats, but they prefer livestock like cows over people. Phew!
• 99% of pandas’ food is bamboo.
• Tigers are the largest wild cats in the world.
• Koala bears sleep the most of any mammal! They sleep up to 22 hours a day, while sloths sleep up to 20.
• Elephants make their own “sunscreen” out of a mixture of mud and sand.

Begin Loves Helping Kids Learn! (That’s a Fact!)

Share these educational fun facts with your child and see which ones spark their curiosity. Maybe they’re fascinated by ocean creatures, or maybe they can’t stop asking questions about space. Whatever it is your child loves, go with it!

Begin can help by giving your child an opportunity to dive deeper into world cultures, science, and animals with our engaging hands-on Little Passports activity kits. Each kit is filled with facts plus a hands-on project to bring learning to life!