Principal’s Message September 2024
“What did you do in school today?” is quite possibly the most asked parent question in the history of questions!
“Nothing.” is quite possibly the most common student answer to the above question in the history of answers! If this wasn’t so frustrating, it would be funny.
In all seriousness, this situation is so common that every year I write a Principal’s Message about it.
As parents, we want to engage our children in conversation that lets us know what they are doing, what they are thinking and how they are feeling. As educators, we wish that our students would share stories with their parents about all the great things they are doing and learning in school.
My own children, now adults, were always great at telling me how their days in school had gone. They never hesitated to share the good, the bad and even the ugly. I even knew when they didn’t use their best behaviour, without their teachers saying a word to me.
I considered myself lucky to be the daily listener, and sometimes sounding board, for my children. I always learned so much. What did I do differently that evoked such awesome conversation? Well, I always started with big, open-ended questions as a starting point to getting the kids talking and getting way more from them than the most dreaded one-word answer, “nothing”!
Some strong conversation starters would be “Tell me something funny that happened at school today”, “What part of your day did you like the most?” (cue recess or lunch discussions here), “Who did you spend time with at recess today?”, “Who did you sit next to at snack time today?”, “Did you have any challenges or tough moments today?”, “Who made you smile today?” “What was something new you tried or learned today?”, “What are you looking forward to at school tomorrow?” and finally one of my favourites, which gets your child truly engaged in relationship building, “Do you want to know what I did while you were at school today?”.
When children respond to open-ended questions, they gain confidence in their ability to communicate, they learn to analyze and evaluate what they have done and what they have learned, they are given an opportunity for reflection and most importantly they (and we) get to the heart of their emotions. These are all important life skills that we are exposing our children to, and at the same time getting the information we so desperately want. It is a win-win situation.
Of course, we won’t want to ask all these questions on the same day or all at once, but we should try out a couple at a time and see which ones elicit the most meaningful responses from our children. Those particular ones can then become our go-to questions that our children will become prepared to answer and become skilled at developing a conversation around.
When we ask questions is often as important as the questions we ask. We should choose times when our children are less distracted and can better focus on conversing with us. We, too, need to be prepared to give our full attention to the conversation that such questions will elicit. Dinner time, quiet time before bed and even on the car ride home, are often great times for these types of conversations. The more practice the children get with this information-gathering, the easier the communication should become and eventually it will even become routine.
When having these valuable conversations with our children we need to be mindful not to interrupt, validate feelings where necessary and finally, thank them for sharing with us. All of these things will fuel their confidence in telling us more and we will be building valuable rapport and trust with them which will become critical to an open parent/child relationship as they grow. Telling little things when they are little will make telling big things when they are big, that much easier.
So next time you hear “nothing” when you ask your child what they did in school today, remember to quickly change your line of questioning and if you can’t remember the list, at the very least say “tell me more, I really want to hear all about it”.
I can also guarantee that there will never be a CGS day when “nothing” is the correct answer!
Onward,
Marie Bates
Principal