Twenty questions written for children, each with a ruled line under it and the answers on the last page. Which animals pull the sleigh. What goes on the very top of a Christmas tree. What you pull at Christmas dinner that goes bang. Nothing on the sheet is borrowed from the grown-up rounds, so a seven year old works straight down the page. Three pages in all.
Children's questions all the way down the page
The sheet is pinned to the children's round of the quiz bank, and the question control is capped at what that round actually holds: ten, twenty or the whole twenty-three. Twenty is where the page opens and comes to three pages with the answer sheet behind it.
Asking for all twenty-three does not pull anything in from the other seven topics to make up the number. That matters more than it sounds. A sheet handed to a child should not quietly turn into general knowledge somewhere around question eighteen, which is the thing that goes wrong when a quiz is built for adults and a children's round is lifted out of it.
The other quiz pages here work the opposite way round. The mixed quiz takes ten questions from each topic in turn, so a child gets one round in six and sits out the rest. On this page the children's round is the whole sheet.
How hard twenty children's questions actually are
Most of them are things a child picks up simply by being in the room in December: what the little helpers who make the toys are called, where Father Christmas is said to live, what the round decoration on the front door is called. A four or five year old answers those out loud before you have finished reading them.
A handful are harder, and they are what keeps the sheet worth doing for an eight or nine year old. How many reindeer pull the sleigh in the old poem. What the day after Christmas Day is called in Britain. How many days there are in December, which catches more people than it should. That spread is why the round still works for a family with a few years between the children.
Answers are one or two words almost without exception, so a child who writes slowly is not held up by the writing. The answer page repeats every question with its answer in bold above it, which makes it the copy to keep beside you while they work.
Reading it out, or handing it over
For under-sixes, read the questions out and let them shout the answers. The ruled lines go unused and nobody minds. For a class or a party, print one each and let them work down the page in their own time, then swap sheets to mark.
Press Shuffle and the twenty are drawn again out of the twenty-three, which changes the order and brings in the few that sat out last time. Print two shuffles and two children get sheets that are not quite the same, which is the easy way to stop one copying the other.
Set Answer sheet to Questions only when you are running off a stack of them. One marked copy for whoever is reading out is enough, and it saves a page per child.
Questions
- What age is this Christmas trivia for?
- Roughly four to ten. The easiest questions are ones a four year old answers out loud, and the hardest ask how many reindeer pull the sleigh in the old poem or what the day after Christmas Day is called in Britain.
- Are any grown-up questions mixed in?
- No. The sheet is pinned to the children's round and the count is capped at the twenty-three that round holds, so nothing is pulled in from general knowledge, history or the food topics to pad the number out.
- How many questions are on the children's quiz?
- Ten, twenty or twenty-three. Twenty is where the page opens and comes to three pages with the answers; twenty-three is the whole children's round with nothing left over.
- Do the answers print with it?
- Yes, on the last page, each answer in bold above the question it belongs to. Switch Answer sheet to Questions only if you are printing a copy for every child and would rather keep the answers to yourself.
- Can a child answer these without help?
- Most of them, from about six. Younger than that, read the questions out and let them answer out loud, because what slows a small child down is the writing rather than the knowing.