Tiny Take Away Journals

Today I brought a bag full of journals to share with the kids of Room 7 at Sun Valley School. Spirits are high. The kids in the class are two days away from being second graders.  

The plan today is to do a show and tell for Ms. Disser’s class about journals, not that this room full of beginning writers need any introduction to journals. Since the first month of the first grade these children have been creating their own their journals. They write about friends, pets, vacations, grandmas, sisters and brothers, sports, favorite games. The topics are wide, the spelling is invented and punctuation is sometimes puzzling.  The results of their efforts are often dazzling.

The point of their journals is writing practice.  It works. Their progress over the year is amazing.   Ms. Disser wants to encourage her kids to keep practicing their writing over the summer. The aim of my talk is to show the kids that journal writing is not something that you do just for school.  I want to share that keeping a journal is fun, and show that there are a lot of ways to do it.

I am a long time journal keeper and collector myself.  Today I brought a handful of my collected favorites to share with the kids.   I tell them a journal can be all drawings aka. a sketchbook. Or it can be only photos, like my room sized fold out of snapshots. A travel journal can be only postcards. I showed  a tiny jewelry journal that I wore around my neck.  There was a dirt journal of colored soil samples collected on my travels. There were oohs and ahhs. Kids asked questions.   

I suggested to the class that they might run out of paper before they ran out of words or ideas.  Then I showed them how to make an instant blank book that had eight pages with a single sheet of paper and some fancy folding. I encouraged the kids to keep journal writing over the summer. I thought the talk was done. 

That's when Ms. Disser stepped up and said,  “Hey,  do you think we could make journals right now? I have scrap paper.”

“Right now?  UH…. OK? I guess..." I replied. 

  

I had considered making fold up books with the class, but doubted this origami stunt was even possible with twenty five first graders. In a flash the whole class dove into making tiny books using only one sheet of paper, folds and scissors.   After a mildly chaotic 15 minutes every kid had a tiny journal to take on his or her summer travels.  There was a lot of excitement and smiles. Even more exciting some of the kids had already started writing and drawing.