Mother's Day, Father's Day or Grandparents' Day interview questions for kids and teens - This awesome, fun, cute free printable is great for preschool children or older in school or at home. Can be done my mom or dad or a teacher. Great questions to spark conversation with grandsons or granddaughters about Grandpa & Grandma.
For many years now, my husband has interviewed our girls and given me the results on this super cute Mother's Day Interview printable. It's one of my most treasured traditions in our family, and it continues even though we have a tween and an actual teen.
This week, I got a request from a reader who's a Grandma, wanting to do the same thing with her grandchildren, and I thought it was a great idea.
My own mom, when she was alive, would have loved an interview like this. She loved all the silly things that my kids would say. Happy to oblige, I created two more interviews, one for Grandma and one for Grandpa.
I know that not all kids call their grandparents by those names, so I added a line that says "and I call him/her ________" so that the name they use can be recorded. It would have been too cumbersome to make one for Nana and another for Mimi and another for MomMom and so on. There are so many different names for grandparents, and every family is different. So I hope this will be okay.
I've shared this list of tips on the other interview pages, but I think it's worth sharing again. There are some tricks to getting good interviews that you'll want to keep forever, and I've learned them through trial and error over the years.
5 Tips for better kid interviews
- Sit in a quiet place out of earshot of other children. You don't want the second child's answers to be the same as the first child's, and if they overhear, they are likely to repeat.
- Let them do something while you talk. It often helps if the child is drawing (a picture of you makes a wonderful addition to the notebook!) or playing with a quiet toy. It makes the child feel less pressure.
- Write down their answers EXACTLY as they say them. Trust me, in 5 years, you will be glad you wrote down "her gives me cookies" instead of "she gives me cookies." You will look back on those mistakes with a happy tear in your eye. I still have the interviews from when Allie was 3, and they make me so nostalgic and happy to read.
- Encourage her. This year, Allie had tremendous difficulty with my age. I don't know why because she knew it last year, but she just couldn't remember and didn't want to be wrong. So when she finally settled on an age (5 years older than I am!), I thanked her for working so hard to figure it out and told her that was a great guess.
- Ask probing questions. This interview is an amazing way to get inside your kids' heads. So when she says she wants to go to Paris with you, ask what she wants to do there or why she picked that spot. You might be surprised at the answer you get and it will give you more to write down than a one-word answer.
Even though Grace (who will turned 13 this year) has grown up quite a bit since we started, her answers still delight me. She said my favorite food is brownies (true) and that we want to go to Harry Potter World at Universal Studios (also true).
I hope you'll print out a few of these interviews, one for each of your kids, and that you'll take 10 minutes today to fill them out. I promise that you will treasure their answers for many years to come.
You can get similar interviews for Mom here and Dad here.
Leave a Reply