In my experience (raising my own children and being engaged with a bunch of parents at the same stage of child rearing) I observed that all of the children were

In my experience (raising my own children and being engaged with a bunch of parents at the same stage of child rearing) I observed that all of the children were very aware that there were things they didn't know. What is more they wanted to know things and that desire expressed itself as questions and curiosity. As a family we have had two activities that have really bound us together, one is my wife's insistence that we always had dinner together, and camping. We also had a used copy of the World Book encyclopedia in a bookshelf near the dinner table, as a series of the Time-Life books on various topics, as well as various popular desktop references like the Scientific American Science Desk Reference. At dinner we would talk about things. All sorts of things. And when we wanted details of a thing we would look it up in the encyclopedia and read aloud from it to share that knowledge. Anything could trigger a wide ranging conversation, from why to police officers give people tickets to people crossing the street to why are there parrots living in Sunnyvale, to how do cellular phones work. And model both learning new things as well has how to find things in available sources. We are fortunate to live within walking distance of the library so the kids could check out a wide variety of books. My wife would often "auction off" the last tasty thing (generally one of her rolls which are super yummy) with an open ended question, best answer wins the treat. Camping was sort of like dinner++ in that there are things to do while camping, like hiking and fishing and whittling different shapes out of sticks, but there was also a lot of time to just talk about things without the distraction of phones or computers or day to day things. All of those things to feed curiosity, provide the time to explore the questions and answers, and try to understand things about the world around us. For our family this worked out well. I don't know if it would work for every family of course. Feeding curiosity is something my parents did and I simply modeled it to my children.