6 Ways to Use Journals in Your Homeschool
Journals can help make writing part of your routine, build analysis skills, add a spine to special studies, and otherwise give your homeschool a surprising boost.
Journaling is old stalwart of school literature classes — such a stalwart that many homeschoolers dismiss it out of hand, remembering boring afternoons of trying to fill up three pages about nothing in particular. Journals deserve a better reputation, though. Used properly, journals can help students develop confidence, not just as writers, but as thinkers and learners — and not just in literature classes, but across the curriculum.
“Journal writing is a way to personalize every aspect of your curriculum,” says a spokesperson for the research team at Saint Xavier University. “Ultimately a journal is a record of a student’s travels through the academic world.”
Want to make journaling part of your homeschool? Think of these suggestions as a sampler platter of opportunities: Feel free to try the ideas that seem right for your particular student, ignore the ones that don’t, and make all the adjustments that you know work for you. Experiment to figure out how journals work best for your student, and keep experimenting so that your methods grow and develop with your student. Like everything about homeschooling, journaling isn’t a “right-way” kind of activity but one that adapts to the particular learners you have.
Journaling works well as a low-tech investment: Though the idea of a big, fat journal full of empty pages may seem inspiring, some writers tend do better with very small, fill-up-able journals that need frequent replacement. Experiment with different sizes to figure out which is the best fit for your child — you may find that different sizes suit different purposes. (Happily journals can be fairly cheap!) Studies show that students do best if they get meaningful feedback on journal entries — but also that journals are less stressful when students know they’re private. Compromise by asking students to choose which entries you read.
1. Use a journal to encourage everyday writing
The more you write, the more your writing improves — especially if you have a space where writing is all about expressing your own ideas and thoughts and not about producing a final product that’s going to be evaluated critically.
“Journaling helps students make connections between what is really important to them, their curriculum, and their world,” says Kay Burke, author of How to Assess Authentic Learning. Some students may have lots of ideas about what they want to write, but for students new to journaling, a prompt can help a lot with getting started. One fun way to generate topics is to use a MadLibs approach: Brainstorm a list of nouns, verbs, and adjectives, and write them on strips of colored paper — blue for nouns, yellow for verbs, etc. Then, draw words to fill in the blanks of a simple sentence: A/an (adjective) (noun) (verb). Tack on a prepositional phrase — before breakfast, in springtime, at the zoo — to connect to something relevant to your child’s current life. Set a 9-minute timer, and let the writing begin.
Tip: This kind of journaling can be most effective if you do it, too.
2. Use a journal to build analysis skills
Think of two-column journaling as annotating with hand-holding: By literally drawing a line between the text and your own ideas, you’re encouraging students to engage directly with what they’re reading. For newbies or really challenging texts, you may want to keep it simple and ask students to simply summarize as they go, but as you get more comfortable, you can track things like themes and symbolism across readings. You can copy passages into a journal, but students can also treat this like a kind of advanced annotation and write directly in the books they’re reading. This kind of journaling works best when you’re writing right beside the text you’re writing about.
“Students make these connections all the time, but two-column journals push them to articulate and defend those connections,” says Burke. It’s often useful to steer new journal-ers toward one specific idea at a time — look for symbols of hope, or focus on this particular character — so that the possibilities don’t get overwhelming.
For new students, this can mean picking out short passages for them to start with. It’s easy to print a paragraph, clip or tape it inside your journal, and write on the opposite page. If your student is having trouble identifying passages to write about, you can prep a few for them to choose from so that it’s easy to get started. Sometimes it can feel like doing part of the “deciding what to write about” part for your student is too much handholding, but if the writing is the point, make it easy for them to get to that part. You can focus on identifying important passages another time if you want to focus on that skill. One of my big homeschool lessons has been that you’re much more likely to feel successful if you keep your focus on one thing at a time.
Tip: Start with a short poem, and give each line its own page.
3. Use a journal to encourage deeper thinking
When students are ready to move beyond summarizing what they’ve learned, it’s time to dive into the world of asking big questions. For some kids this comes naturally, but other students need a little more guidance, and journaling can provide a useful framework.
Ask students to jot down three questions they have after every new chunk of learning — it might be a chapter of a novel, a podcast about the Norman invasion, or a new math concept. Help students figure out if their questions are informational — are they clarifying something? — or theoretical — are they considering how ideas, implications, and assumptions extend beyond the text? Over time, students will have more and more theoretical questions and become better at recognizing where information gaps manifest in their learning, two things that push deeper thinking.
I talk more about how to encourage kids to ask questions using the Good Thinkers Toolkit in episode 4 of the Thinky Homeschool podcast. (link to the HSL Patreon)
Tip: This journal technique works best if you use it consistently.
4. Use a journal to support self-evaluation
Journaling can also be an effective way to encourage students to evaluate their own work. It may help to have a list of questions for students to work from: What was the most interesting thing about this assignment? How much effort did you put into it? Are you pleased with your results? What do you think is the best part of this project? If you’d had another two hours to work on it, what would you have done? Asking students to write a journal entry at the end of major papers and projects can give you meaningful insight into their thought process, effort, and achievement, says Art Young, editor of Language Connections: Writing and Reading Across the Curriculum.
Figuring out how to evaluate student progress can be tricky for homeschoolers, but kids get a lot of benefit out of assessing their own growth. Taking time to do this not only helps students see where they can improve in the future (thoughtful people will always be able to find something to improve), it also helps them identify places they’ve improved from the past, boosting their overall academic confidence.
Tip: Ask students to submit a journal with every big assignment.
5. Use a journal to add rigor to rabbit trails
One of the great things about homeschooling is being able to follow where our child’s interests lead, but it’s not always easy to figure out how these rabbit trails fit into your curriculum. Sometimes, that’s just fine — after all, everything you study doesn’t have to be about your transcript — but sometimes, a rabbit trail becomes a passion that you want to keep a record of. Journaling makes a lot of sense here — it’s low-effort, but provides a useful history should you need it.
Every week — or as often as seems appropriate — ask your child to jot down what they’ve learned or wondered or been inspired by in their chosen area of interest. You might end up with pages about Minecraft mods or records of kitchen experiments. Over time, kids may come back to certain topics over and over again — when you’re stuck trying to figure out a topic for a history project, flipping back through these journals reminds kids what gets them excited. Maybe they’ll be inspired to build a Roman village in Minecraft or to write a medieval cookbook.
6. Use a journal to spur discussion
One of the best ways to learn about literature is to talk about it with someone else, and for homeschoolers doing their curriculum at home, that someone else is likely to be you. How do you help your student get beyond plot summary and generalizations to deeper discussion? The micro-journal is one effective approach.
After you read something or cover a new topic together, take 5 minutes to jot down your big ideas and questions on an index card. (Stick to a small writing surface so that it feels easy to fill up with ideas.) Don’t worry about complete sentences or perfect phrasing — focus on getting down as much as you can. If it helps your student to have a focus, concentrate on connecting themes to other literary elements, like plot, character, or setting — that’s loose enough to include lots of ideas, but it gives thinkers a place to start. This on-the-fly brainstorming will help student push past their initial impressions so they can dig into material in a less superficial way.
