HEEELPPP a six year old just came into the nature center and she had SO many questions. it's pouring rain and nobody else is here but her family so non-stop for an hour she had my full attention. by the end of it i had half my field guides open to various insects and mammals and birds and she just kept going.
she became extremely fixated on bigfoot and asked about the ways people try to prove its existence until I was explaining DNA to her, and she asked such thoughtful questions! she said, "what if someone found a skull they thought might be bigfoot, and there was hair left over. could we use DNA from hair to prove it's bigfoot?" but before i could answer, she said, "but if you don't have a living bigfoot that you KNOW is bigfoot, to take hair from, how could you know this hair from this dead bigfoot is really bigfoot hair?" !!!! what an awesome question!!
so this 6 year old and i started discussing control groups in scientific studies and she was so engaged!!
then the bigfoot talk led to discussions of extinction which led to dinosaurs, and she said, "what I don't understand is why people say dinosaurs are extinct, but they also say that dinosaurs became birds. how could they all be extinct if they became something else?"
she asked questions that really challenged me in that figuring out how to answer them on the fly in a way that's digestible wasn't totally straightforward.
a few minutes ago, the adult with her said it was time to go and get ice cream and she said, "can't you see I have 1,000 more questions to ask? i have to just bloooowwww them all out now so you don't have to answer them later."
I saw my younger self in her so much LOL. They said they're coming back tomorrow and I said, "I won't be here, but my colleague knows even more than I do!" And she said, "Well, I hope so. He's gonna need to."
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