Turn a Documentary Into a Conversation Worth Having

A documentary watched and never discussed is an hour of television. Three questions afterwards, over a drink, turn it into the thing you told yourself it was.

How it goes

1. Watch it together. Questions from someone who did not watch it are transparent to a child.
2. Prepare three shapes of question: one about a fact that surprised them, one about how the film was made, and one about what it left out.
3. Ask them away from the screen, at a meal or on a walk.
4. Answer them yourself too. Say which bit you did not believe.
5. Look one thing up together afterwards, chosen by your child.

The prompt

We just watched a documentary about deep sea creatures with a 10-year-old. Give me three questions for afterwards: one about what might have surprised her, one about how filmmakers get shots like that, and one about what a film like this usually leaves out. Conversational, not quiz questions.

The middle question is the one most parents never think to ask, and it is where media literacy starts.

What a good result looks like

The surprise question should point at a category rather than a fact: Which creature did you not believe was real? invites an answer; How deep do anglerfish live? is a quiz.

The filmmaking question is the one to judge hardest. Good: How do you think they lit something that lives in the dark? Weak: Was the camerawork good? And the omission question should be answerable by a child, so What do you think the divers did all day that we did not see? rather than anything about editorial bias.

Check it before you use it

• Does it assume content? The AI has not seen the film, and will invent specific scenes. Cut anything referring to a particular moment.
• Facts in the questions. A question containing a wrong claim teaches the wrong claim.
• Tone. Questions can arrive sounding like a comprehension test; rewrite them the way you actually talk.

Keep the human part

Saying “I did not really believe that bit” gives your child permission to be sceptical about something beautifully filmed, which is a hard and valuable thing to learn.

If it is not working

If the answers are all one word, ask your question again about a specific moment rather than the whole film. Children have far more to say about the bit with the octopus than about the documentary.

If your child resists being questioned after watching anything, stop asking and start offering. Say what surprised you, what you did not believe, and what you wondered about how it was filmed. Most children join in within two of your three.

One thing to watch

Three questions maximum, and none of them immediately after the credits. Give it an hour. Children need time before they have anything to say.

Related: reading questions beyond what happened uses the same shapes for books, and teaching kids that AI can be wrong extends the scepticism to what a chatbot says.