How are You Playing with Questions?

In honor of “Question Week,” I thought it might be fun to share the ways in which I am playing with questions at home.  We all know that questions are important. They can be serious, they can be more important than answers and they can be playful!  With two boys, ages 7 and 8, I am living with the silliness of questions.

After being inspired by a Huffington Post article “25 Ways to Ask Your Kid So How Was School Today Without Asking Them How Was School” originally posted in 2014, I started asking my kids crazy questions.   It wasn’t easy and I fell back on old habits asking, “How was school today?” more than once, but I was always rewarded with a more interesting conversation whenever I had a more interesting question.  One of my favorite tools to support this question asking endeavor is an app called “Talk2Kids” that offers one question a day to use with kids. Here is a glimpse of some of the questions from last week:

• If you were a zookeeper, what would be the scariest animal to feed?
• What is the longest word you can spell?
• If you could choose who would you sit by in class? Who would you NOT want to sit by in class?
• If you could create a new flavor of ice cream what would it be?
• What would you do if you found a magic wand?

My boys love answering these questions.  We usually ask and answer them on the walk to or from school.  We talk, share ideas and laugh. Time flies. It has already been two years of me intentionally asking questions during our walks.  I don’t do it every day, but if it goes too long without a question my boys ask for it. It’s become a part of our routine and we all enjoy the playfulness of these questions.

With Amazon’s Alexa at home, there are many more opportunities to play with questions. It turns out 7 & 8-year-old boys push Alexa to her question answering limits.  Here are just a few questions my boys have asked Alexa in the last few weeks and Alexa delivers a humorous response to all of them! (Don’t believe me, try asking them!)

• Alexa, can you sing me a song about technology?
• Alexa, what does a fart sound like?
• Alexa, where did you come from?
• Alexa, what do you eat?
• Alexa, can you tell me a joke?

Not too long ago, my youngest son, Owen started asking a question every night at the dinner table.  Sometimes the questions are downright silly, but sometimes they are pretty profound for a seven-year-old and they stump my husband and I.  Just the other night he asked us, “If you could create any business you wanted what it would be? Why? What would name it?” Not to be outdone by his younger brother,  my older son Jake asked us, “What is your biggest failure that you’ve turned into an opportunity?’” Speechless, but happy I have to believe playing with questions on our daily walks to school is helping them develop more curiosity and making them more comfortable with questions.  How are you playing with questions?