Explaining Titanic to Young Kids

If you’re in need of explaining Titanic to young kids, whatever the reason I have just the post for you. I would like to say I’m not a strange person who goes around Explaining Titanic to Young Kids but I feel I am one of those people. I have the strangest conversations with the kids. But, in this instance though it was justified. This explanation was in anticipation of us visiting Titanic the Exhibition.

I love history and the story of people’s lives and I want my children to experience these stories. Primarily so that they can begin to have empathy and understanding for people. They don’t know they’re learning this 🙂 And, i’m hoping this is working.

So before taking them to the Titanic I realised that it would be a pointless exercise unless I started explaining the Titanic to the kids. I had to make them understand or feel the “realness” of the story.

The pictures in this post are of when we visited Titanic the Exhibition in Sydney. As you can see the kids were able to experience it and sit on the iconic staircase, walk around the ship and touch an iceberg. All in the name of history and empathy I say.

Explaining Titanic to Young Kids

How on earth do you explain the Titanic to kids? As it turns out its not that hard. It goes something like this:

“Did you know that a long time ago there was a boat.

Everyone who knew about the boat thought it was the most amazing boat in the whole wide world.

It was a huge magnificent boat. It was a boat that was specially built to go all the way from London (I know this isn’t right – its “artistic licence”) to New York.

Everyone wanted to go on it. And lots of people did.

But, at night, during the journey there was an iceberg in the way and the captain driving the boat thought it would just be a small iceberg so they didn’t need to go around it.

The problems with icebergs though is that you can only see the tip, the bit that sticks out the water, not what is underneath. This iceberg was huge because most of it was under the water.

The Titanic hit it and it made a huge hole in the boat.

There was water gushing in the boat and everyone had to run to the lifeboats but the problem was that there weren’t enough boats so lots of people had to stay on the boat.

Unfortunately those people who didn’t get on a lifeboat sunk with the boat.

It was very very sad.”

And after Explaining Titanic to the Kids?

After explaining Titanic to young kids, in true young kids style you’ll be left with more questions than answers. You should have a million questions about icebergs, skeletons and how you could possibly go on a boat that sunk.

In response to this I googled loads of images to show the kids. I found images of icebergs, the Titanic as it currently is and photographs of what people looked like in those days.