15 General Knowledge story ideas, each one a book your child stars in: The questions children actually ask, answered in a story instead of a fact sheet. Pick one, add a few details, and the illustrated book starts right away.
Every story is painted in a soft, hand-drawn watercolour look, with your child in a school uniform working the problem out.
The teacher puts out a jar for questions nobody can answer in class. Your child drops in "why is the sea salty when the rain is not", and spends a week finding out that the answer starts with rocks, not water.
Lesson: A good question is worth carrying around
With no working clock in the courtyard, Your child pushes a stick into the ground and marks where its shadow falls each hour. By evening there is a clock made of chalk marks, accurate enough to call everyone in for dinner.
Lesson: The world tells the time if you watch it
Someone claims a crow lives a hundred years. Your child cannot find the answer in any book at home, so writes to the town library, and the reply that arrives two weeks later is the first letter ever addressed to Your child.
Lesson: Asking someone who knows is not cheating
A family quiz competition comes down to one last question about the tallest mountain in the world, and Your child remembers it only because of a fact picked up from a library book weeks earlier that seemed useless at the time.
Lesson: You never know which fact will turn out to matter
A school project using balls of different sizes to represent the planets seems simple until getting the distances between them right on the same table turns out to be impossible, and Your child learns just how empty space really is.
Lesson: Some things are too big to fit into a small model properly
Making a timeline of inventions for a project reveals that the humble pencil has been around far longer than the telephone, which surprises Your child more than any of the fancier inventions on the list.
Lesson: The oldest things are not always the simplest ones
A jar of animal fact slips passed around at dinner keeps producing surprises, and the one about an octopus having three hearts makes Your child check three different books before finally believing it is actually true.
Lesson: A surprising fact is worth checking, not just doubting
A jigsaw puzzle of India's states seems easy until two odd-shaped pieces near the northeast keep getting swapped by mistake, and Your child finally learns all seven of those state names just from fixing the same two pieces over and over.
Lesson: Getting something wrong twice can teach you more than getting it right once
A cousin's claim about the fastest human sprint sends Your child to look it up properly, and the real number turns out even faster than the guess, which somehow makes the cousin more pleased than embarrassed about being wrong.
Lesson: Being corrected by a fact is nothing to be upset about
A quiz about which countries share the same three colours on their flags turns into a much longer conversation than expected, and Your child is startled to learn how many flags around the world use red, white and blue in different patterns.
Lesson: Looking closely shows how much things that seem the same actually differ
Looking up one word in the big family encyclopedia for homework somehow leads to three more pages being read purely out of curiosity, and an hour later the original homework question is still unanswered but five new facts have been learned.
Lesson: Curiosity sometimes takes you further than the question you started with
A small bet with Bhaiya over whether it will rain by evening sends both of them checking the radio forecast, the colour of the clouds, and even the direction ants are moving, before finally waiting it out on the balcony together.
Lesson: There is more than one way to guess what is coming
A strange old tool in a glass case at the local museum has no label anyone can find, and Your child spends the whole visit guessing its use with a friend before a guide finally reveals it was an old grain-measuring cup.
Lesson: Guessing carefully is half the fun of not knowing yet
An argument with a classmate over which river is the longest in India ends in a trip to the school library atlas, where the answer settles the argument but opens up ten more questions neither of them expected to ask.
Lesson: One answer often leads straight to the next question
A nightly family habit of sharing one new fact at dinner means Your child has to actually find something interesting every single day, and after a month the family has learned more odd little facts than any single book could hold.
Lesson: A small daily habit builds up into something bigger than expected
