Homeschooling in the summer seems like a natural progression for many families. Often the approaches look nothing like traditional study programs, but can incorporate day trips and lots of time for exploring.
Advantages of Using Summer Journals With Kids
These adventures of summer are good opportunities to begin journaling. Each child can have a small notebook or journal and pencil or colored pencils that stay in the vehicle in which they primarily travel. Each time they go on an outing, whether it is to the pool, the library, a museum, or the farmers’ market the children can record in their journals.
According to the article, "Journal Writing Every Day: Teachers Say It Really Works!" by Gary Hopkins of Education World ®, one special education teacher from New York, Donalee Bowerman, reported on the success of using journaling with children. Bowerman claims in the article that the children benefited from the journaling because it gave them opportunities to write when the typical stresses of correct spelling, grammar, and formatting were not issues.
Journal Writing Prompts for Homeschool Children
Children sometimes have a difficult time staring at a blank piece of paper and developing thoughts into words. When everyone is in the vehicle, a parent can give a prompt such as, “Pull out your journals and write down where you think we might be travelling to today.” Starting small is key, and the ideas can build from there.
Some possible journaling techniques include dating each entry and describing where the day is headed. The kids can make predictions about what will happen, what they are looking forward to (or dreading), and anything else they are anticipating. On the trip home there might be time to record what actually happened during the day.
Journal entries could also just be about the day in general, such as weather, mood, what was eaten at breakfast, or what the child dreamed about the night before. Even the younger children can draw pictures about these things. They learn to record thoughts, ideas and events on paper and feel a part of the activity while doing so.
Children are keen observers so parents can take advantage of this and ask their children to look for unusual things in the scenery they pass and write about it. This can be a car with blue lightening stripes, a tandem bicycle on the sidewalk, a house with no door in front, or a road sign that doesn’t make any sense.
It is important to change the journaling suggestions, and vary the length of each one. Sometimes asking for the children to only record one word that describes the day or the trip is just as meaningful and challenging as asking them to write about the park that was just visited.
Developing Natural Writers and a Love of Language With Journaling
As children mature, both in age and academically, they will hopefully develop into natural writers and the writing and journaling prompts will not be needed. Families can even let one member of the family choose the journal topic for a given trip, taking turns on different days of the week.
By the end of summer the journal will be a recording of all of the adventures shared. Kids might like to add pictures to their words, so providing them with copies photos taken throughout the summer to tuck inside their journals can enhance the experience by making the journals into scrapbooks. Before a parent, or a child, knows it, the summer has come and gone, but there will still lessons learned as memories were made.
Resources:
Hopkins, Gary. "Journal Writing Every Day: Teachers Say It Really Works!" Education World, 1999.
Chris Oldenburg - The homeschooling mother of four children, I am also a freelance technical writer. After more than 10 years of homeschooling I enjoy the ...
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