Daily Journals

I think that daily journal writing was the most detested part of my elementary school years. Oddly, I am not a horrible writer. I just hated journal writing. Honestly, I still don’t find journal writing to be a terribly inspiring pastime. So, it’s not surprising to me that lots of kids (and adults!) resist the idea of daily writing. However, it’s hard to argue with the valuable educational outcomes of writing. Barnabas Emenogu, summarizing current research on the benefits of writing in the early grades, concludes:

Amongst other things, I have suggested that a key benefit of getting elementary students to start writing early is that the amount of writing they do during their school years has a strong impact on the way they think, the amount they read, and the quality of their writing as adults. Motivating students to write in many forms for many reasons will enhance not only their achievement but quite possibly their life chances.

Just this summer, I again realized how much daily writing can help kids.  I was amazed at the progress Dillon with our consistent (not daily) journal writing.  It was definitely worth the pain it took to get the habit started.  Daily journal writing remained somewhat challenging for both of us, but I reassured myself with this tidbit from The National Council of Teachers of English:

The “language arts” develop in concert. Drawing supports writing, writing supports reading; opportunity to use multiple expressions of language increases language learning and ability.

So, I feel pretty good that any kind of literacy activity contributes to the overall goal of developing reading and writing skills.  With that in mind, I learned to be flexible about what constitutes a journal entry. After we spent a few weeks developing the basic concept of journal entries,  I let the kids do different kinds of entries. You can easily search online and come up with all kinds of creative journal ideas, but here’s a few that have worked for us:

• lists of favorite or most disliked things
• free association activities
• acrostic name poems
• comic strip stories
• riddles and jokes
• recipes
• maps
• sketches and explanations of inventions

As I mentioned in the video, two crucial components of a journal writing at our house are story paper and a decent list of writing prompts. I happen to like the calendar format of that link, but you can search online and find many excellent compilations of journal prompts for kids.

Now that school has started, I’ve slacked off a bit. I know that Dylan has daily writing in class, so I’ve kind of given myself a pass for now. However, if you need to help someone get over a hump in reading or writing, daily writing is almost certain to help.  And making it fun, is going to help even more.

So do you have any great ideas for keeping journals with kids?  Let us know, because it seems that keeping writing fresh and new is the best way to keep it going.

Tags: art, creativity, dylan, early elementary, reading, writing