Want just the tool? Get to Know My Child has its own page — easier to bookmark and to pass on.
A teacher meets a class as twenty-five names, a seating plan, and a set of files written by other people. The families in that room already know which child needs a minute before they will speak, which one goes quiet rather than asking, and which one will say a task is boring when it is actually hard.
That knowledge exists on day one. It usually reaches the teacher somewhere around November, in pieces, after something has gone wrong.
The Get to Know My Child form is one page that asks for it in week one instead. It takes a family about ten minutes and a teacher about two to read.
What a file does not contain
School records are good at some things and silent about others. They hold attendance, assessment scores, any formal plan, and what previous teachers chose to write down. They do not hold the things a family would tell you in a five-minute conversation if anyone asked.
- That a child will attempt anything if they are not being watched, and freeze if they are.
- That reading aloud goes badly not because of the reading but because of an older sibling who laughed once.
- That the family moved in July and the child has not mentioned it to anyone at school.
- That a child who seems uninterested is exhausted, because a new baby is not sleeping.
- That the fastest way to settle a particular child is to give them a job.
None of this is a diagnosis and none of it belongs in a permanent record. It is context, and it is the difference between reading a behaviour correctly the first time and reading it wrongly for a term.
Ask early, before the year sets
The value of this form is almost entirely in its timing.
Ask in the first week and a family reads it as interest. You have no history with the child, so nothing they tell you sounds like an excuse for something that already happened. They are also, at that point in the year, more willing to write three sentences than they will be in six weeks.
Ask in October, after a difficult phone call, and the same questions read as evidence-gathering. The answers get shorter and more careful.
There is a second reason to be early. What a family tells you in week one shapes how you interpret week three. A child who stops working after ten minutes is a different problem depending on whether the form said “gives up quickly if it looks hard” or “needs to know what to do next or they stall”. Without the form you will make that call from a distance, and you will sometimes make it wrong.
What the form asks, and why
The sheet has six questions and a contact line. Each one is there because it changes what a teacher does.
What should I know about your child that won’t be in their file? The open question, deliberately first. Most of what matters arrives here, and putting it first signals that the rest is not a checklist.
What are they proud of? A child’s own sense of what they are good at is often not the thing the school has noticed. It is also the fastest route to a first real conversation with them.
What comes easily to them? Useful for pitching work, and useful for pairing children. A child who finds something easy is a child who can be asked to help.
What’s hard for them right now? Right now is doing work in that sentence. It invites the current difficulty rather than a permanent label, and it gives the family an easy exit from anything they would rather not put in writing.
How do they respond when something is difficult? The single most operationally useful answer on the page. Withdrawal, bravado, tears, distraction and refusal all look like different problems and are frequently the same one. Knowing the child’s shape in advance saves a term of guessing.
What helps them settle? Families have usually solved this by trial and error over several years. Asking means a teacher can use the answer on day three instead of inventing their own by week seven.
Then a home question, marked only what you’re comfortable sharing, and a line for the best way and time to reach the family. That last line is not filler — a phone number that is answered matters more than the one on the enrolment record.
Say what will happen to it
Families answer honestly in proportion to how clearly they understand where the paper goes.
Tell them plainly: it stays with the class records, it is read by the child’s teacher, it is not added to a permanent file, and it will not be shared with anyone who does not teach their child. Say what you will do with a sensitive answer before they write one.
The sheet already says only what you’re comfortable sharing under the home question. That sentence exists to be believed, which means the rest of the process has to earn it. A family that suspects the form will follow their child for six years writes nothing useful on it.
Read them twice
Read the returns once as they arrive — you will be matching names to faces and little will stick.
Read them again in week three. By then the names have attached themselves to children, and the sheets stop being a list of assertions and start being recognisable. This is the pass where a teacher notices that the child who will not start work is the one whose family wrote “needs to know exactly what to do first”, and the problem turns out to have a written solution that arrived a fortnight ago.
A third read before conferences is worth it too. Opening a meeting with something the family told you in September — and showing that you acted on it — changes the tone of that meeting entirely.
When a form comes back empty
Some will. A blank sheet is information, not a failure.
It may mean the form never made it out of the bag, that a family is not confident writing in English or in a school register, that they are wary of schools for reasons that predate you, or that they are simply overwhelmed. None of those mean the family does not care, and treating a blank return as evidence of disengagement is the most common way this exercise goes wrong.
Offer a second route. A two-minute conversation at pickup, a phone call, or asking the questions aloud and writing the answers yourself will all produce the same information. If language access would help, arrange an interpreter rather than relying on the child or an older sibling.
Families can send it unprompted
The form is written for a teacher to send home, but nothing stops a family filling it in and handing it over in the first week. Most teachers are glad to have it, and few will have thought to ask.
If you are a parent doing this, keep it short and factual, lead with what helps rather than what is wrong, and offer it as something useful rather than as a set of instructions. Our guide to getting involved in a child’s learning covers the wider version of this relationship.
The form
Get to Know My Child is a free one-page PDF. It prints in black and white on US Letter and is designed to be written on with a pen. There is no account, no email address and nothing to install, and you may print as many as you need — for one child, a class, or a whole school.
For the conversation that comes later in the year, see our parent–teacher conference questions, and for a check-in three or four weeks in, the First Weeks Check-In.
Sources and further reading
- Henderson, A. T. & Mapp, K. L., A New Wave of Evidence: The Impact of School, Family, and Community Connections on Student Achievement — on the association between family engagement and outcomes.
- US Department of Education, Family and Community Engagement framework — on building relationships early rather than at the point of difficulty.
- Harvard Family Research Project, on two-way communication between families and schools.
