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Originally Posted by SeattleUte
Today my five year old son asked me two difficult questions:
How was the first human made? Whew, explaining natural selection to a child is a lot harder than Adam and Eve. You guys have it easy. But he seems to have gotten the gist; in fact somebody already told him about some basics such as the distant kinship between saber tooth tigers and tigers (may not be exactly right but works for purposes of general illustration). Any ideas of examples or analogies to give children?
Next he asked me why all the music we listen to was made by people who are dead. This came after he asked me wheter Mozart, Bach, Beetoven, etc. are still alive. (We only play Classical music to our children.) It's not easy to explain that the best way to know you're consuming wheat and not chaff is to wait a century or so after a work of art is created.
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This is SOO much more fun than the Adam and Eve story. When the boy asked me some similar questions, I started off with the big bang, and started working forward from there. Children this age are so amazingly curious, and their minds soak this stuff up like a sponge. I went through the whole lifecycle of a sun with him several months ago, and thought that most of it went over his head, until a teacher told me that he was playing a science game in class (1st grade) and that he knew WAY more about suns than any child his age has a right to know.