Educating our children is one of the most important aspects of parenting. This article on animal facts for kids makes for interesting reading about little known facts about the animals that inhabit planet earth. Encourage your child to read and learn in a fun way, and share knowledge with friends and have great fun doing it. You can arrange family fun quizzes and make the learning fun!

In biology the word "Animal" comprises all species belonging to the animal kingdom; it is very interesting to read about the little known facts about these animals found in our world today.

Some of the more interesting animal facts for kids:

• A cow can produce more milk than a single human being can consume in one lifetime - approximately 200,000 glasses of milk! Apart from this staggering figure, you will never find two cows with the exact same pattern of spots!

• Horses weighing approximately 1,200 pounds eat roughly seven times their own weight each year!

• When a lion roars you can hear the sound from a distance of about 5 miles away.

• Cheetahs are swift and merciless toward their prey. Scaring the living daylights out of man and beast but the sound they emit is anything but scary - more like a dog yelping. However you can hear them a mile away!

• Elephants are the largest land animals alive in the present age. An elephant's tusks grow all through its lifetime and can weigh as much as 200 pounds; usually tusks grow for the male species. The females are seldom found with very small tusks or no tusks at all.

• The Chimpanzee is often considered the closest of all animal species to man, with an intelligence that supersedes all other animals. Chimps as they are commonly referred to actually make tools and use them to get their food. They adopt highly refined hunting strategies to get their food. To Chimps status is important; they are also very manipulative and deceptive in their behavior patterns. They can be taught to use symbols, numbers and some aspects of the human language.

• The Giraffe is the tallest living mammal in the animal kingdom and has approximately double the blood pressure of any other animal to enable blood circulation, especially to the brain.

• Some interesting animal facts include: rats live longer without water than even the Camel does; squirrels bury their nuts and often forget where they have hidden them, inadvertently helping to plant millions of trees.

The animal facts for kids detailed above are only a tip of the iceberg; it is hoped that once a child's interest is awakened, he or she will continue to read more.