Free printable · for parents and grandparents
The First-Day Interview: Free Printable School Questions
Everyone means to write down what their child actually said on the first day of school, and almost everyone ends up with a phone full of undated photos instead. This free printable fixes that for one school year: seven questions to ask your child, room to write what was really said, a slot for the first-day photo, and a height line. Fill it in on the first day or during the first week — it takes about twenty minutes. The one thing it asks of you is that you ask the same seven questions next September, in the same words, because two answers to the same sentence are worth more than twenty to different ones.
Take it with you — free, no signup
Direct download. No email, no account — just the files.
What it does
- Gives you the seven first-day-of-school questions in their exact wording, with the hint that goes under each one — favorite thing right now, best friend, what you want to be, the hardest thing, the funniest thing, what you're proud of, and what you wish grown-ups understood.
- Adds the five rules that decide whether the answers are worth keeping, starting with the one nobody manages first time: write it exactly as they say it, grammar and invented words and wrong facts and all.
- Ships already showing a filled-in year — the same seven questions answered by an eight-year-old — so you can see how much detail is enough before you write a word.
- Includes the school-year header fields — grade, school, teacher, date — plus a 4×6 photo slot and a height line, so the page dates itself and the measurement can be repeated the same way next year.
- Ends by showing what five years of one question look like read straight down, which is the part a single page cannot do for you.
Own it, don't rent it
Want all fourteen years, not just the first one?
This free page gets one year written down. The full School-Years Keepsake Interview Book is all fourteen — pre-K through grade twelve, ten pages per year-set, with the same seven questions frozen in every one of them plus 84 more written for a single grade each (every one carrying the reason it is asked at that age) and 42 alternates for the year a question lands badly. It adds a Read-Across Ledger that gives each constant question its own fourteen dated rows, a growth ruler for all fourteen heights on one scale, a teacher-and-class record, a 36-row milestone timeline, a note on what to expect at every age, and a guide to running the interview. 205 pages in four PDFs, with the Interview Book and the Read-Across Ledger also supplied in A4, bought once and printed again for every child you have.
A one-time purchase you keep and reprint — the owned book between a blank notebook and an app that may not still exist by the graduation it was meant to reach.
A keepsake page for recording a child's own answers — not developmental, educational, psychological, or medical advice, and the age notes are general observations about interviewing children rather than milestones any child is expected to meet. Every name and detail in the worked example is invented. Free to use; please don't resell or redistribute.