My DS wasn't saying he didn't like school, but I was having trouble getting him to say anything substantive about his day. One rather silly thing that worked: I had been asking him things like "what was the most fun thing you did today?", but then we turned it into a game. He had to think of an adjective (fun, hard, boring, interesting, annoying...), call it X, and then think of the most X thing that had happened that day. He described the thing, and I could ask questions about what happened, but not about how he felt about it. I had to guess what X he was thinking. Interestingly to me, this wasn't always easy! And it was very informative.
I recently played this game with our son and it
worked like a charm! He opened up quite a bit and it led to discussion on ways to make school more "fun".
Thanks so much for the idea.
