What is your question?

Curiosity is a culture you have to consciously build in kids, my way of doing that is leaving a voice message for my son on WhatsApp – what is your question today?

Yesterday I got two questions from Ethan, (we leave voice messages for each other).

1) Why do people show the middle finger?
2) How did dolphins escape when the meteor hit the earth and killed all dinosaurs?

That was awesome opportunity to teach him; I decided to focus on the 2nd question, as the first one will be too complicated for a 5-year-old to understand.

So I created a simple timeline – making it as simple as possible but still staying as accurate as possible.

He received the image by email, and then we got on a WhatsApp video call.

Apparently, he had thought that the meteor hit the earth and killed everything in an instant.

I explained to him that not everything died, in fact, the big dinosaurs died out much after the impact due to the lack of food as they were big and had to eat and the impact had removed a lot of food.

This gave an opportunity to smaller mammals to survive and thrive, and dolphins evolved from land animals, and their legs became fins.

So dolphins are not fish? – Ethan has seen dolphins; there are dolphins in Mauritius.

“See, they have to come outside the water to breathe – like you when you swim.”

Then came an even more unexpected question.

“So how do they sleep if they have to come up to breathe”?

Dolphins can go to sleep with half their brain each time. They close one eye, and half their brains sleep one time and the next side.

I sent him more pictures of dolphins half sleeping always one eye open.