Learn English – How to ask someone about what happened

I think you understand things correctly.

How is used to ask about the quality/degree of something, or the manner in which something was done. When you ask someone how is X, they may respond with a details in a similar manner as what, but the reason is to communicate a quality/degree - typically "good" or "bad."

So...

How is your teacher?

She's this really weird tall lady with these crazy glasses, and she was yelling at everyone today.

The implication here is that she considers the teacher a bit intimidating, so somewhat "bad." And that's what the person asking how really wanted to know.

What's X like to me, implies that you are less interested in the person's personal feelings - rather, you want to know how X compares to other X's - than how's does. But this can be influenced either way greatly by context.

Q: What's the weather like over there?

A: It snows a lot down here, and sometimes it rains.

Q: So usually, how's the weather over there?

A: It snows a lot down here. But it's raining now.

Q: How's the weather?

A: Rainy. Take a jacket.

Q: What's the weather like?

A: Today? It's rainy.

You are really asking two questions rolled into one.

There's the question of what is grammatically correct, and all of your examples are well-formed, grammatically speaking. They're even idiomatic, in that they are sentences that native English speakers might use.

The problem is, while they're idiomatic, for an awful lot of English speakers, they would be idiomatic for a hostile or suspicious interaction.

Your second, implicit, question is perhaps best stated, What question might a husband ask to solicit information from his wife about what she did that day?

This is really not an English language question, but an English language speakers culture question. Because here's the thing: very many people in English-speaking cultures would find directly being asked to account for their time to be rude. Not hugely rude, necessarily, but subtly disrespectful.

The conventional friendly way to express interest in how someone spent their day is to ask a question about how their day was – meaning whether they found it good or bad, agreeable or disagreeable – rather than asking what they did.

This is generally understood to be a prompt to disclose what details of how one spent one's day as one prefers to share, without pressuring one to account for oneself and one's time.

So it might look like:

Husband: And how was your day, today?

Wife: Ugh, the Throckmorton-Swift account turned out to be even more a fiasco than we thought, and I had to spend four hours in down in Accounting with that bozo, Jean, trying to find all the reports. Thank goodness the Veep of Sales took us out for consolatory beers after. How about you?

If you're wondering, "But, what if she just says, 'It was fine' and doesn't disclose any information...?!" that's the point: she's not being pressured to disclose, so she might very well not chose to disclose. That's why it's considered polite, where asking her point blank what she did is not.

This comes up in a big way in parent-child interactions. Parents can get away with asking their younger children "What did you do at school today?", but as they get older, typically in their teens, children begin to take offense at being asked point-blank like that. Hence the conventional – to the point of being a joke – teen response of, "Nothing". Parents often feel entitled to ask – because they feel entitled to know what their kid is up to – and are reluctant to ask the politer question, "How was your day?" because they don't want to be dismissed with a simple, "Fine."