What Does Your Friend Like to Eat?
Interview a friend about their favorite foods, record answers, and make a simple chart or mini-poster to compare tastes and learn about data.
About this activity
Interview a friend about their favorite foods, record answers, and make a simple chart or mini-poster to compare tastes and learn about data.
What you need
Step by step
- 1
Step 1
Pick a friend you want to interview about food.
- 2
Step 2
Write five simple questions about favorite foods on your paper.
- 3
Step 3
Choose six foods to ask about and write them as a list.
- 4
Step 4
Draw a chart grid with one row for you and one row for your friend and columns for each food using your ruler.
- 5
Step 5
Read your questions out loud one time to practice.
- 6
Step 6
Ask your friend each question.
- 7
Step 7
Mark your friend's answers on the chart.
- 8
Step 8
Answer the same five questions for yourself.
- 9
Step 9
Mark your own answers on the chart.
- 10
Step 10
Count how many people liked each food.
- 11
Step 11
Write the total number of likes at the bottom of each food column.
- 12
Step 12
Add a big title at the top of your chart to turn it into a mini-poster.
- 13
Step 13
Decorate the poster with colors drawings or stickers to make it fun.
- 14
Step 14
Share your finished mini-poster on DIY.org
Fun facts
How do I do the 'What Does Your Friend Like to Eat?' activity with my child?
Start by choosing a friend and preparing simple questions like “What’s your favorite breakfast, lunch, snack, and dessert?” Use a clipboard or tablet to record answers. Interview the friend—encourage full sentences and honesty—then sort foods into categories (fruits, vegetables, grains, sweets). Create a chart or mini-poster using stickers, drawings, or a bar pictograph to show how many liked each food. Finish by comparing tastes and talking about patterns.
What materials do I need for the 'What Does Your Friend Like to Eat?' interview and chart?
You’ll need paper or a poster board, pencils and colored markers, stickers or small pictures of foods, a clipboard or tablet for interviews, and a ruler to make simple charts. Optional: printable templates, sticky notes, crayons, camera or phone to photograph results, and a chart key. Keep materials portable and easy for kids to handle; prepare picture cards for younger children who can’t read.
What ages is the 'What Does Your Friend Like to Eat?' activity suitable for?
This activity suits ages 4–10 with simple adaptations. Preschoolers (4–6) benefit from picture choices and adult help recording answers. School-age kids (7–10) can write responses, create basic bar graphs or pictographs, and compare results independently. Older children can track more friends, categorize foods in more detail, and discuss patterns. Adjust complexity of questions and chart types to match reading and fine-motor skills.
What are the benefits of doing the 'What Does Your Friend Like to Eat?' food interview with kids, and how can we vary it?
Interviewing friends about food builds communication, empathy, and early data skills: kids learn to ask questions, record answers, sort categories, and spot patterns. It encourages respect for different tastes and practice with counting and simple charts. A variation is to run a class survey, create a colorful pictograph, or compare meals by age or favorite food group. Supervise interviews to ensure polite, consent-based questions.
Watch & Learn
Need help?
If I don't have a ruler or stickers, what can I use instead?
Use a straight edge like a book or the edge of a cereal box to draw your chart grid and substitute crayons, markers, or cut-out magazine pictures for stickers to decorate the mini-poster.
My chart looks messy and my friend got confused while answering—how can I fix that?
Redraw the chart grid neatly using a straight edge, clearly label the two rows (you and your friend) and each food column, and practice reading your five questions out loud once before you ask so answers are recorded correctly.
How can I adapt this activity for a 4-year-old or a 10-year-old?
For a 4-year-old, use only three pictured foods and let them mark likes with stickers, while for a 10-year-old expand to more classmates, keep the six-food list, and turn the counts into a simple bar graph based on the totals at the bottom of each column.
What are some ways to enhance or personalize our finished mini-poster?
Add photos of the actual foods, use different colors or stickers to show likes before you add a big title and decorations, convert the bottom totals into a small bar chart, and then photograph the poster to share on DIY.org.