Surrounding Your Child with Science

One way to get your child interested in science is to surround them with science.  Don't suffocate them with science, but make sure that they see science often.  One simple way to do this is a breakfast/lunch/dinner place-mat   For each meal in our house plates go on a place-mat   My wife and I get boring adult place-mats while my daughters get fun place-mats with pictures and cool designs on them.  A couple of years ago I bought a planets place-mat at a science teaching conference I attended.

As you can see it shows all 8 official planets (sorry Pluto!) with some basic information on each planet.  Just the other day my 5 year old was looking at the place-mat while waiting for me to finish getting lunch ready.  She says to me "Daddy, I only know two planets, Mars and the Sun."  Okay, so we had a short discussion on how the Sun is not a planet, but a star. :-) Then we went through each of the planets in order from the Sun.  A simple thing like a place-mat got my daughter asking about science!  Surrounding your kids with science will help generate an interest in science, guaranteed!