As a mom, one goal you probably have for your family is to participate in activities that are meaningful, fun and interesting for everyone. Keeping a journal as a family is just the project for this and it will leave you with everlasting and special memories.
Journalizing – yup, that’s the correct word. Who knew, right? – is an artistic means to expression and connection, and there are several ways you can make keeping a journal a family affair.
How to Make Family Journaling a Traditional Pastime
First of all, let’s review how you’ll go about it:
- Everyone can sit down with their own journals and enjoy journalizing together but separately.
- Each family member can contribute to one journal as a group.
- There can be one journal that’s passed around between each other. Recently, we shared “how to start a mommy and me journal,” which may give you some ideas.
Next, you’ll decide if everyone is going to journal in a free-for-all manner or create the same or similar thing in their own journals. I recently did this with my children with collage journalizing.
First, explain to your children/family how to collage journal. Here’s what I told my children:
- Gather magazines, stickers, colored paper, glue, markers, ribbon, scissors, rulers, ink and stamps, paint, pencils and the like. Choose images, words, pictures, drawings and decorations to cover your entire page (in our case it was two facing pages).
- Browse the magazines and cut out images you like. A key thing I shared with my children is they could choose images from one category, one color, one interest, etc. And they were instructed to look for pictures or images their siblings or I would also like.
- Place your images, stickers, words on your paper before pasting to get an idea of how it will look.
- Lastly, put everything in place, leave it open to dry and get ready to share with each other.
It took us more than an hour to gather, find and paste everything and the results were amazing. Sidebar: My children are 8, 10 and 11 so getting them to participate in and complete this project isn’t too difficult. Plus, we all enjoy art.
Even if you or family members aren’t artistically inclined you will still enjoy this. Just relax and choose images that you enjoy or that speak to you. For instance, my 10-year-old daughter chose everything food related. My youngest child, an 8-year-old girl, decided on Lego® Friends and small animals. My son, 11, stuck to mostly the color green with race cars and large animals with a drawn super hero thrown in for good measure.
In addition to collage journalizing, there are art journals, poem journals, personal journals or a combination of them all. For instance, you can paint a picture and compose a poem to place somewhere within the painting.
Of course, there is always the act of using words to record in a journal, which can also be done together. The main purpose of journalizing being a family affair is to enjoy time together while using a creative outlet.
Do you have a family journaling tradition?
Image: iStockPhoto
