Topic card questions

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I'm not sure if any of you have used topic cards or not, but my son and I were recently introduced to them in a training course of sorts for those with autism. It helps out our social skills quite a bit, seeing as neither of us really ever ask others about their interests unless it is just on a whim. Otherwise, it's usually "me, me, me" because that is our comfort zone, lol.

My son REALLY enjoyed using the cards, because it served as a guideline kind of to carrying on a conversation. It helped me as well, because it was my job to encourage him asking questions about others, so I had to step outside of my normal too... and it wasn't as bad as it seems, lol.

So now I'm working on making a set of these things for us to practice conversation with at home, but I'm not sure what kinds of questions to use. I would like a variety seeing as if we just use the 6 or 7 questions I can come up with over and over and over, it would get repetitive and we will burn out quick.

I suppose I'm looking for "small talk" types of questions, even though small talk really really sucks, lol. She explained that if you can withstand the small talk, one can move people in to actually being friends... and then we can indulge them with ramblings of what we want to talk about, lol. I'm not so huge on small talk, and I don't really care whether or not I have friends usually-not in RL at least, but my son does want them.

So... lol, once again, the point of the post. If anyone can think of some general topics of interest and some follow up questions for them that he could ask, that would be great

It sort of depends on how old your son is.

The topics I most immediately gravititate towards when I'm making "small talk" are...
school (which has many subsets, including homework, classes, teachers, how little you are sleeping because of it, et. cetera) and music.

I'm trying to think about how I manage small talk, and am not seeing any helpful advice.

A good starter question for most conversations (for me at least) is "How are you doing?" Of course it doesn't work so well if the other person just interprets it as a standard NT social type noise....

lol, tis true. My son is 6, and what the trainer was working with were questions like "what is your favorite type of animal?" (followed by "why do you like it?" "what other animals do you like?" "Have you ever seen one in real life?") and "what is your favorite color?" "...movie?" etc.

She referred to that as small talk... and I was a bit lost, as I'm used to hearing the generic "how are you?" "fine" type of stuff, but I suppose it is small talk to ask those other questions as well if it is someone you don't know well.

I'm wanting to find questions from this game called the Ungame, which was really kind of interesting. They had a lot of scenerios and examples to talk about how you would handle a situation, as well as the little questions.