School is almost out and the lazy days of summer are right around the corner. Well, the days we experienced as lazy when we were kids, anyway, because for a few months our schedules were more open. Some of us may be anticipating the time our children will have on their hands and others may be stacking activities for them one upon the other. Either way, consider using summer to start a family or neighborhood journal. (If you are a teacher, consider this idea for fall when school reconvenes.) Kids working together with adults to create a family memory album will help your family or group bond and enjoy developing reading and writing skills.

To get started on this project:

Step 1
Find or purchase a fat, cloth covered three-ring binder into which everyone can put pages or even whole spiral bound three-hole punch notebooks and photo holder pages. The group can begin by decorating the cloth cover of the notebook with colorful pen drawings or writing their names and encircling them with designs. Find a pile of photos and magazine pictures to glue on as well. Next, use dividers to make sections in the notebook. You can suggest some such as: At Home, In the Neighborhood, School, Out and About, On Vacation, and Holidays and Celebrations and see what the others contribute. Perhaps the sections will be titled more introspectively: Questions I Think About, What Scares Me, What Makes Me Laugh, The Things I Wish Were True, etc. Whatever the age of the kids in the group, creating the book in this way will inspire the desire to make entries.

Make sure you have a stack of notebook paper and a three-hole punch for computer generated entries. Your whole group can write for each section or members may chose specific areas for which they want to write. As family members finish entries, they can put them into the binder along with pictures. You can paste or draw some pictures in the album and invite the others to each write something on the subject or about the person in the picture. You can suggest they write about the time the photo was taken as well as about the particular day on which they are writing.

Leave the book where everyone can see it frequently and look to see what’s new in it and enjoy older favorite entries again and again. When one binder is full, you can put in on the bookshelf and your family can start another. When family members are away from home, they can send entries about their trips to be included in the journal. Or, when group members are together, they may write about the same incident, including their particular observations and responses. This will allow everyone to have many windows into the same event. In addition to photos and drawings, objects may be pasted into the book for everyone to write about–leaves, twigs, scrapes, matchbooks, menus, napkins, and labels are all easy to put into an album.

 Reading through the family journal frequently will help all family members stay enthused about contributing, although there needn’t be any specific number of entries each person has to make in a week or a month. Everyone can add to the book as they wish and to read the others’ entries.

Step 2
Treat each entry with respect, even ones bent on embarrassing someone or those that seem incomplete. All written work is valuable. In a journal most of the writing is necessarily spontaneous rather than perfect and complete and sometimes, because of self-consciousness, someone may “goof off.” There is usually something that the reader might respond to: “Well, I saw that happen, too, though I thought something else. I’ll go ahead and write what I saw and thought.” It is best that readers of the entries share what they like about the writing with the author. If this is hard because of the goofing off, it may just be that the entry raises a subject that the other readers can respond to in their own way. Most often, the entries will be sincere, and specific appreciation is best. It is good to tell the writer what images and details made an impact and what feelings came up inside from specific words, sentences and scenes. For instance, if you found yourself smiling as you read about a flat tire episode that had actually made you mad when it happened, the smile might be coming from the way the entry writer caught an expression just right or noticed something no one else had and it will benefit the writer to hear this.

After you have shared what images and details struck you and how they made you feel, you may want to share something about what else you wished to know from the entry’s writer. For instance, if you read an entry about a birthday party where the gifts were “beautiful,” you might ask the entry writer what about the gifts made the writer describe them as “beautiful.” You can tell the writer you want to “see” the gifts in a way that will make you think they are beautiful, too. You can ask the writer what details would make that happen. This kind of talk honors the writer and the writing and in so doing encourages stronger writing next time so others can really experience things for themselves in the very way the writer experienced them.

Step 3
Use writing games to encourage participation. Here are some ideas for a section called “Family Writing Games.” These games will help deepen the writing ability of the group and keep the family journal interesting to write for as well as to read:

Play a Metaphor Game

Inventing metaphors helps develop skill with description and sharing them offers a refreshed view of the world. Designate a page in the journal each week where one person writes an image (me when I soak in the bathtub, for example) and others respond to that image with something somehow very alike, but also very unalike, which offers a sudden “a ha” about experience:

me when I soak in the bathtub,
a pit inside a peach;

me when I soak in the bathtub,
a foot inside a shoe;

me when I soak in the bathtub,
an octopus reaching for a place to hold on.

On another page, someone can start by sharing another image:

cornflakes in my bowl,
a school of dolphins

cornflakes in my bowl,
autumn leaves on the snow

cornflakes in my bowl,
a nest of beetles.

Family members can take turns creating the opening phrase and then during the day or week others can add in their “comparison.”

Imitate Effective Writing

Use the family journal as a place to paste in poems, articles, and other writing that family members come across and enjoy and want to share. Take turns having someone from the family create a writing exercise modeled after one of the shared pieces. This way family members will have a prompt or writing idea to use to get started. Their finished entry can go in the section of the book where it fits, even though the writing began by following a prompt or imitating a strategy.

For instance, many of us have come across this poem by William Carlos Williams.

This Is Just to Say

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

If I had pasted that poem inside a family journal, I might ask others to write a short note that begins “This is just to say” and goes on to reveal something small that they enjoyed that the rest of the family has not had the opportunity to enjoy or doesn’t seem to enjoy as much as you do. Alternatively, family members might read this poem as a creative way to excuse having something inconsiderate. They may want to write apologies themselves in Williams’ style.

Collect Words No One Knows the Definitions For

Encourage group members to write down words in the journal that they do not know the meaning of and doubt others in the group will know. Then have everyone write his or her own definition of the word including looks, sounds, smells, tastes, and textures. After everyone has contributed a possible definition, the person who donated the word can look it up in the dictionary and write out the definition. It is fun to read how each person’s imagination works!

Find a Way to Tell it Slant

The poet Emily Dickinson wrote that we must come at things slant:

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant—
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth’s superb surprise
As Lightening to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind—

Here’s a writing idea that will help you and your group dazzle gradually with truth.

This exercise requires thinking of an irritating situation, a neighbor who makes noise, a relative who is angry with you, a boss who never says thank you, a person who breaks promises, a friend who doesn’t invite you to do things.

The writer must decide on one such irritating situation and then title a poem about it, for example “When I Saw My Neighbor Get into His Car and Heard the Blasting Stereo Again” or “When You Didn’t Come Home Again for Dinner.” Then the writer uses the template below to get a poem going in two stanzas:

I didn’t say ______________
I didn’t see_______________
I didn’t _____(an action)_____________

I said ______________________
I saw_______________________
I ___________(an action______________

Your group will be amazed at what they find out by inventing what they didn’t do and then reporting or inventing what they did do. Everyone can feel free, by the way, to add more things they didn’t or did say, see or do. The “didn’t say, see or do” part must be first, though, and the “did” part second. The contrast between the two is what allows the writer to get to the bottom of his or her mind and heart.

This writing exercise also lends itself to a group write — everyone can agree on the irritating situation and then each person can contribute an I didn’t say, see, or do and a said, saw and did. A collaboration such as this that will make everyone laugh, cry or become pensive.

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Take the opportunity to help those you care about create a group journal and you’ll be passing on the valuable tradition of writing and reading to understand others. You’ll be doing your part to foster good communication, lasting enjoyment and enthusiastic writers and readers.