Writing a diary is the best way to express your emotions and keep your memories about important things that happen in your life and in life of your child. And not only memories.
Mindfulness is what we are striving to teach our children so they don’t get lost in an overwhelming information flow and numerous gadgets, and that they know and understand themselves. Diary is the basic tool to analyze your day. This skill is like a sport meant to develop persistence, discipline and focus. This skill should be developed from childhood.
Preschool kids can hardly write more than a few words. Special trick is to complete the diary with your mother (or father).
Most of us tried to write a diary at a different age. How to support the desire to write a diary and do not quit in a few days?
There are a few ways:
- the process should be exciting. Beautiful diary, nice to touch paper, nice pens, sharp pencils.
- using different materials: herbarium pages, photos and stickers. To have various tasks for every day, surprise element.
- creating intimacy: here is our diary, here is beautiful pen, here is nice handwriting. Not is the time for both of us (especially important if family has more than one child)
- creating intrigue and scarcity. Do not let the child review future pages. The child who receive diary as a gift at the end of the day, looking forward to complete the pages.
- let the child to decide what to write in the diary. Just write under dictation.
- baby can draw whatever he/she consider being important. Do not expect and do not ask for high art pieces. Let the child to reflect his/her condition and impression. Provide the freedom of expression.
- if you miss a day, or even a few, do not worry. Just continue where you have left last time.
Why to write a diary, and not having a conversation with your child in the evening?
Reason one.
During writing, we form our thoughts in a different way. By pronouncing the words loud before writing them down in a beautiful notebook with a beautiful pen – you are creating the magic. If the child asking to take a break, let him/her think, he/she is trying to formulate an idea nicely. Try it yourself. Laconic style of pages will not allow you to go to hypertext.
I can see the result with my son – he is trying to choose the core from his own flow of words, saying them in a clear and interesting way.
Reason two.
You should write. I mean physically and emotionally be there for your child. Do not try to write email with one hand, and washing the dishes and talking over the shoulder, do not scroll Facebook. At one moment, my son started to protest: “Listen to me with your face!”.
Just in a twenty quality minutes you will learn about thoughts of your most loved one and how the day went.
Me and my husband created My bright journal specifically for these moments. It helped to dramatically change our family communication.
And what is your idea about writing a journal? Happy to hear about your experience.
P.S. I read an interesting book by famous author Lev Tolstoy “Flight from paradise”. Everyone in the estate kept diaries. And all the guests were given diaries.
