Over the years, I’ve had my kids work on various journal activities. Their most frequent journal writing assignments have been to write about something they did – a family adventure, a homeschool group field trip, or a solo outing. We all enjoy looking back at what they’ve written.  

My oldest in particular, when looking for a way to end his journal entries as a first or second grader, would write, “It was fun.”  Or when he was feeling verbose, “It was a lot of fun.” Not a lot of points for creativity, but it was gratifying to know that he enjoyed what we were doing.  

Journaling is an important activity to include in your writing program. It helps your students learn how to organize information from memory. At its most basic, journaling is a simple recounting of events.

“We went to the museum. I saw a lot of dinosaurs. We ate lunch. It was fun.”

The writing assignments can become longer and more complex as writing ‘endurance’ improves or even earlier if you allow them to dictate the journal entry. Dictating allows them to go for length without being intimidated by the physical process of writing. You can use dictation with whatever method works for you and your child:

  1. Let them dictate the whole story. You are the scribe. And it works best if you are a silent, nonjudgmental scribe. Only speak up if they need some gentle prompting.
  2. Have them write the beginning sentence or paragraph and then let them dictate the rest to you.
  3. Have your child alternate between writing and dictating sentences. 

I do like to encourage my kids to find one aspect of the event that they found memorable and focus on writing about that. By doing this, you avoid a tedious chronological recounting:

“First, we waited until everyone in our group showed up and then we went in. After we got in, all the moms had to go to the bathroom because they had been drinking coffee…”

Depending on the event, you may have them do research to find out more about one item they thought was really interesting.  Or, you might have them go all out with describing that one thing. Maybe they thought it was super funny, unbelievably gross, or incredibly boring.  Have them work on conveying their impressions to the reader. 

Then, if you’re going for more than a loosely guided freewrite, provide one clear and achievable goal for the assignment. Early on, I realized that writing can be an exercise in frustration for everyone when you expect your students to do everything right. Here are just a few ideas to let your students know what you’re looking for from them:

  1. Sensation – how did things feel, taste, or smell?  Use adjectives, adverbs, or hyperbole. Ask them to count up how many of each they used.
  2. Mood – was the experience peaceful, stimulating, or creepy?  Along with vivid description, use synonyms, onomatopoeia, and change up the sentence structure.  This writing goal is hard to quantify, but you should be able to tell if your child made a solid effort. If so, the goal was achieved.
  3. Grammar – maybe you have the seemingly small goal of asking them to remember to capitalize the first word of each sentence.  Or punctuation. Again, pick one thing.
  4. Research – where can they find credible information to learn more?  Focus on having them search for and identify one or more good resources.
  5. Length –  give them a distance goal.  Four sentences, half a page, a whole page.  The assignment is finished when they meet this goal. No corrections, no revisions.  Sometimes the goal is just to write. 

When you give them one clear goal, both you and they know whether that one goal has been met. Sure, you might find 20 other flaws in their writing. That’s your opportunity to choose ONE of those flaws to work on with your next assignment. You’ll see progress without the frustration of trying to fix everything at once.

Whatever your goal – processing and organizing information, recording memories, improving grammar, increasing writing ‘endurance’, or mastering grammar and language mechanics – journaling is a worthwhile writing endeavor for your students. 

Make sure you save at least some of these journal assignments.  I guarantee you’ll look back at your homeschool journey, despite any complaints that were made at the time about journal writing assignments and you’ll say – “It was fun.”

Make sure you save at least some of these journal assignments.  I guarantee you’ll look back at your homeschool journey, despite any complaints that were made at the time about journal writing assignments and you’ll say – “It was fun.”