Keeping a Daily Journal for Homeschooling

"About this time now that your child is learning some words, learning how to sound out and create their own words, you can begin to have them do a daily writing sample. It's nice to keep them all together and so we call that a daily journal. Although it doesn't have to be a journal in the sense of how you might think a diary or keeping personal thoughts, there could be something different they write about everyday. Some days I like to call them free writes. You can say write about anything you want. Other days to give them a little bit or an idea, you can give them a sentence starter such as; One day I... and tell them to finish it. You can have them write it on their page. One day I...and then tell them to finish. Or you can say, I found a dog who... Be creative. Or you can say, we just went on a trip yesterday, tell my about the trip in your daily journal today. And it's their time to really start learning creative writing, expressing their selves. What I do is I take, you could do this, you could use a notebook but basically what I do is the top third of the page I box off, have them draw a square, a rectangle and use that to draw a picture. They don't get to draw the picture until they finish writing, that's kind of the rule, it's like a reward at the end. Have them always start out by putting their name and date. By this time you should be teaching them how to write the date. You can take the 12 months and put them on flash cards and they can memorize them and they can't spell them perfectly, they can take out the flash card and copy. But teach them to write the date and then down here they write their story. If you want them to have good handwriting which I do, I would either take my computer and make a sheet with a box already made and some handwriting and then take a bunch of those sheets and staple them together and call that your journal, make a cover. Or you could take your handwriting paper and mine is shaped kind of funny but I manage to make it work. The picture there, name, date, and then they have three lines to write and that is how we do our daily journal."