All About My Dad – Father’s Day Interview for Kids
Father’s Day interview questions for kids and teens – This cute free printable is great for preschool children or older kids in school or at home. Can be done by mom or dad or a teacher. Awesome, fun questions to spark conversation and laughs.
PIN IT FOR LATER!
Way back in 2013, I started Mother’s Day notebooks for each of my kids. I asked Joe to interview them and write down their answers exactly as they said them, and I keep all those interview sheets in notebooks with all the pictures they’ve drawn of me and all of the special little “I love my mom” cards they’ve given me. These two notebooks are among my most treasured possessions. They always rank on the “What would you save if your house was on fire?” ice breaker questions.
All those years ago, I printed out a handful of interview questions for each of my kids and stuffed them inside the front pocket of the notebooks. Unfortunately, when I ran out of the pre-printed sheets, I could not find the original PDF anywhere – not on my computer, not on Pinterest, not on Google. So I recreated it. You can find the All About My Mom interview here and the All About my Grandma and All About My Grandpa interviews here.
You can also find first and last day of school interviews for kids here.
In 2020, a sweet second grade teacher, looking for activities for her students during this strange period of social distancing, emailed me to ask if I had created a similar interview form for dads. It never occurred to me because my husband isn’t the same sentimental fool that I am, but I thought it was a great idea, so I made one.
All I really did was to change all the MOMs to DADs and all the HERs to HIMs. The question aren’t new, just flip flopped to make sense for dads. I like the original so much; I didn’t want to muck with it.
So here you have it, the All About My Dad interview that you can print out for Father’s Day, Dad’s birthday, or really any time of the year.
I hope you’ll print out the interview and do it with your kids. Do what I have done and store them in a notebook in page protectors so that you’ll have them to look back on for many years to come.
If you’re looking for something to do on Father’s Day, head over to this post. It includes more than 25 activity suggestions!
Also, here are 30 Cool DIY Father’s Day Gifts for Kids to Make for Dad or Grandpa, just in case you’re in the market for those.
Materials needed:
- Father’s Day interview form (use the red button above or below)
- 3-ring binder (I have one per kid. Also, I generally prefer Better Binders from Staples, but these notebooks are small, only ½” binders, and Better Binders don’t come that small. Also, these don’t get a lot of action and so don’t need to be super amazing binders.)
- Page protectors
5 Tips for better Father’s Day 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 be 13 in a couple of weeks) has grown up quite a bit since we started, her answers still delight me. Last year, she said my favorite food was 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 to fill them out between now and Father’s Day. I promise that their dad will treasure their answers for many years to come.
