Simple Journaling Ideas for Kids

These simple journaling ideas will give you some fresh inspiration for how to incorporate journaling into your homeschooling!

Journaling has so many benefits and can be such a useful homeschooling tool.

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But have you ever opened up a notebook to a blank page and felt stuck?

What to write?! Maybe you’ve even thought, Is writing the only thing to do? 

Benefits Of Journaling

Before getting into different ways to approach journaling, let’s chat about how journaling might be a great addition to your homeschool routines.

1. Develops Writing Skills – There is only so much copy work and so many essays a person can do before boredom starts to set in. In order to develop young writers, it is important to stretch their writing muscles in different ways. Journaling allows for a low-stakes way to try out different writing voices, different writing styles, and build repetition without it feeling like repetition.
2. Builds Emotional Resilience – Sometimes you just need to get the thoughts out of your head. This is true for adults, but it’s also true for kids – especially older kids going through middle school and high school. During those years, life can feel overwhelming, and while we don’t want to promote naval-gazing, it is helpful to have a place to sort out the thoughts and emotions of daily life.
3. Solidifies Knowledge – “The mind knows nothing but what it can answer to itself in the form of a question.” Basically, until a child acts on knowledge, they haven’t made it theirs. In a homeschooling situation, journaling is a great way for children to narrate, to “tell back” what they’ve learned.

Nature Journal Prompts

Another habit that is important to instill in kids of all ages is to spend frequent time in the natural world.

There is extra benefit when you’re truly observing nature, instead of just being out in it.

Here are some prompts to help guide a nature journaling practice:

1. “I Notice, I Wonder, It Reminds Me Of” – This three question set is the foundation of all nature journal entries. Moving from observation to critical thinking to building connections, this method of approaching a nature journal page can be used for specific objects found on a hike or the landscape as a whole.
2. Tree Personalities – Pick a tree and make it come alive. Give it a personality. What is that tree like? What about it’s appearance helped guide those decisions? Is it annoyed with the birds and squirrels, or welcoming toward them? Does it enjoy having neighbors, or would it prefer a prairie? This is just for fun – don’t think too deeply about this one.
3. Draw Connections – So much of nature is an interconnected web. Visit a tide pool and draw a diagram of all of these connections. You could do the same connection mapping in the forest or a grasslands. This can be such a natural journaling opportunity for families who travel a lot!
4. Leaf Rubbings – Go on a tree walk and collect as many different types of leaves as you can. Create leaf rubbings in your nature journal, and make notes about the differences and similarities you notice.

Creative Writing Prompts

Move over, three-paragraph essay.

These fun journal prompts are an excellent way to check for comprehension, while allowing your child’s imagination to play!

1. Be A Playwright – Say you just finished studying a specific time period or historical event. Write a dialogue between a set of characters, acting out a scene. In doing so, students move from just knowing about an event to exploring the motives and emotions involved. This is a particularly good journal prompt for middle school students, as they learn that there’s often something to think about on every side of a story, and history has few true villains.
2. Write Poetry – Why do so many journal writing prompts deal with prose? Let’s play with rhyme and meter a bit, shall we? Keep this style of prompt simple at first. Practice it by writing poems about favorite things or a recent memory. Then, you can expand it to school subjects. For example, “Write a ten-line poem about how Lewis and Clark must have felt when first seeing the Pacific Ocean”. Or “Pretend you are Thomas Edison and have yet again failed to make the lightbulb. Write 8 rhyming stanzas about your frustration or hopefulness”.
3. Diary Entry – You’re Juliet and have just met Romeo. You’re Abraham Lincoln and the southern states just filed for cessation. You’re Magellan and you’ve been in the ocean for so, so long. What would you write in your diary or logbook?
4. Speeches – Speeches are perhaps the best way to practice persuasive writing. It’s also an excellent tool for exploring motives and building your own communication skills. Choose any historical or fictional character, and jump into their shoes. How would you rally your men at the Alamo? How would you spur on factory workers during the pre-unionized Industrial Revolution? 

Artistic Journaling Prompts

Just because there are lines on the page doesn’t mean you have to write!

Shifting to artistic journaling open up tons of possibilities:

1. Read-Aloud Sketching – It can sometimes be hard to keep attention secured during school read-alouds. To help your children, ask them to sketch what you’re reading while you’re reading it. We did this for several months during history read-alouds, and by the end of it, our sketches were practically a timeline of that time period.
2. Comic Strips – Go easy on the writing and heavy on the drawing with this fun way of retelling! You can use comic strips to narrate the plot of a scene in a short story, a trip to a favorite place, or any other special experience.
3. Postcards – After field trips of exciting adventures, give your children a piece of card stock and have them draw their own postcard. If you keep it to approved dimensions, you can even send it through the mail to a good friend or family member.
4. Posters – Have your student design the cover of a playbill or film poster for their favorite book or a play they just watched.

Gratitude Journal Prompts

While introspective journaling has less to do with homeschooling per say, it does have a positive impact on children and teaches them an important skill.

A gratitude journal is a fantastic way for children to practice perspective and selflessness.

Journals can help kids process difficult emotions after some newsworthy current event.

Asking for a journal entry about funniest memories can be a fun way to connect. 

Sermon Notes

From the time our kids were little, we’ve encouraged them to take sermon notes. If this is something that is important to your family, you can invite your kids to:

• Draw what they’re thinking about as the pastor is teaching – of course you want them to draw something that has to do with the sermon. ha! Unless maybe they’re someone who listens best while doodling – I am a bit that way at times. I truly am listening and absorbing.
• Write the key points. Maybe your church displays these on a large screen like our church does.
• Jot down a prayer to the Lord – something that is on their heart as a result of what they’ve heard during the teaching.

There are a number of ways journaling can be encouraged outside of the homeschooling environment, and this has been a great opportunity for us.

Would you kids enjoy outside-the-box Book Report ideas like this?