Families are their children’s first educators. All children share a great deal of experience with their parents and siblings and these shared experiences become the basis for memories, for knowledge, and for future learning.
Children learn a great deal about the natural world just by participating in everyday life. This spontaneous learning can be enriched and multiplied when parents take time to talk with their children about their experiences and elaborate on various aspects of the natural world. This gives children a way of organizing their knowledge and the vocabulary needed to talk about this knowledge with others.