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Before you even board an airplane or load your car for a roadtrip, you can get to know Yellowstone National Park. A little pre-trip research goes a long way in getting kids exciting about an upcoming trip. When they get into the park, they’ll be able to teach you a thing or two.

Puzzles and Games

• Stroll around the Yellowstone National Park website in search of items for an online scavenger hunt.
• Play the Antler/Horn Match Game and see what kinds of strange creatures you can make. It’s good fun for everyone.
• Learn Yellowstone terminology with a word search such as the Yellowstone word search, The Geysers of Yellowstone, or Watching for Fires in Yellowstone.
• Wolf Quest game is an immersive, 3D wildlife simulation game, WolfQuest challenges players to learn about wolf ecology by living the life of a wild wolf in Yellowstone National Park.
• See photos, listen to sounds, and learn about 26 animals that make Yellowstone home in the Yellowstone Animal Alphabet Book.
• Download and print your ownYellowstone Coloring Book Pages.

Videos

• Each of the videos in this National Park Service series, Yellowstone InDepth Videos, is less than 10 minutes long, yet answers a number of frequently-asked questions with help from park rangers, scientists, and historians. Kids will find out what Yellowstone’s young wolf population is teaching ecologists, how the relationship between visitors and the park’s bears has evolved over time, how geysers work, what new species are invading Yellowstone’s lakes and rivers, and more.
• Video clips and interactive tools help kids learn about the natural history of geysers, hot springs, and fumaroles in National Geographic Kids: Explore Yellowstone. My vote for most fun: Listening to a mud pot bubble.
• What are the odds of Yellowstone’s supervolcano erupting sometime this century? Find out in the Science Channel’s What are the Odds? This short clip poses the question, gives a brief historical overview of volcanic activity in Yellowstone, and crunches numbers to come up with the real-life odds of a big blowout.

Virtual Visits

• Take an electronic field trip and check out the online educational programs at Windows into Wonderland.
• Stop by the Old Faithful virtual visitor center. This virtual trip through the Old Faithful Visitor Center is almost as good as the real thing.

Other Resources

• The National Park Services produces a book, usually updated every year, with concise information about the park’s history, natural and cultural resources, and issues. Yellowstone Resources and Issues is my go-to for science and natural history facts about the park.

Junior Ranger Program 

• You don’t have to step foot into Yellowstone to become an online Junior Ranger. The Web Ranger Program is the National Park Service’s site for kids of all ages. If you love our National Parks, Monuments and Historic Sites, this site is for you. If you are new to our National Parks, this site helps you experience how wonderful they can be. They have recently updated this site to make it even more fun. You can now customize you Ranger Station, earn more rewards, and play new activities. And they are making new activities all the time.