My boys have been back to school for about a month now and I don't know if it's the same in your house but if I ask how school was or what they did at school I often hear "fine" or even ...silence... So after trying this for a while and being mostly ignored we decided to change it up a bit and asked for advice and looked up ideas.

The best advice I received was from the boys' teacher last year. She said to first tell them about our day and by doing this it would model how we want them to behave. So now when we pick up the boys we feed them a snack (I have some hangry boys) and love on them, cuddle them, just randomly chat in the car and let them unwind. And, we do not ask anything about school until dinner. Once it is dinner time I'll ask my husband what he did today then he asks me what I did today. Then sometimes the boys will tell us on their own, sometimes they won't so we prompt with a few specific questions on their day about things we know they are working on, their friends... we never ask open-ended questions because it usually backfires (you get a yes or a no and it ends the conversation).
To make this process more fun I wrote down a list of the questions we ask, plus some more we should ask, both in French and English, printed the strips and put them in jars. This way every night the boys can pick one strip randomly and it is their question for the evening! It makes it a fun game now and we are hoping it will make it more fun for them to tell us about their day!

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