The Family Newspaper: One Page, Written by Your Kid Reporter

A reporter needs two things: something that happened, and someone who saw it. Your house has both every week. Your child never gets handed a notebook and sent to go find out.

How it goes

1. Pick one real event from the past week. A lost tooth, a new pet, a disputed goal in Saturday’s game. True, and small enough to cover in one page.
2. Your child decides who to interview. Usually the person it happened to, plus one witness. “What happened” and “how did it feel” are different questions, and a good story needs both.
3. Use the AI to build the interview, not the story. I am interviewing my brother about losing his first tooth for our family newspaper. Give me six questions a reporter would ask. Do not write any of the article.
4. Your child runs the interview, writes down the answers in their own words, and asks one follow-up question that was not on the list.
5. Write the article by hand, headline first. A good headline names what happened: “Max’s Tooth Came Out Mid-Sandwich,” not “A Tooth Is Lost.”
6. Add one quote, in quotation marks, exactly as the person said it.

Who does what

AI hands over a list of reporter questions before the interview starts, and nothing after.

Your child chooses the story, conducts the interview, writes every sentence, and picks the headline.

You are the second interview, if the story is about you, and otherwise the audience.

Make it easier or harder

For a six-year-old: you ask the questions out loud together and your child writes down only the answers, in whatever handwriting that takes. The reporting is the skill; neat spelling is not the point yet.

For an eleven-year-old: require a second source. For a game story, interview both the scorer and the goalkeeper, and let the two accounts disagree in print. Two honest people remembering the same five minutes differently teaches more than a grammar lesson could.

Take it off the screen

Run one edition a week and pin it to the fridge before dinner so the subject of the story gets to read about themselves first. A reporter’s notebook, bought or folded from paper, turns this into a standing job rather than a one-off assignment.

Keep a folder of back issues. A year of one-page newspapers reads like a diary nobody meant to keep, and it pairs well with a family time capsule if you are building one of those too.

When it goes sideways

The interview turns into a conversation and nobody takes notes. Hand your child the notebook before you start: the pause to write down an answer is also the pause that produces the next question.

Nobody wants to be interviewed this week. That is itself a story. “Why Nobody Would Talk to Our Reporter” is a legitimate front page, and it teaches a reporter without a willing source to say so rather than invent one.

One thing to watch

Keep the newspaper inside the family. If a story involves a neighbour, a teammate, or anyone outside the house, get their and their parent’s okay before quoting them, and leave their name off anything that leaves your fridge. The AI tool should never see a real address or a stranger’s full name either, so keep the interview prompt limited to the questions, not the answers.

ChatGPT and Gemini set thirteen as their minimum age, and Claude requires eighteen, so this one runs on your account with the screen visible.

Related: make a family cookbook, one recipe page at a time is the same interview-then-write structure applied to a grandparent’s recipe, and turn your child’s drawing into a whole story world uses the same “AI asks, child answers” rule for fiction instead of fact.