When the summer of ’22 came around our kids were starting to really write full sentences and understand the concept of punctuations. I did not want to lose all of that progress through the summer so we started implementing summer journals. This included primary composition books (the ones with larger lines and a space for drawings), stickers, colorful pencils + markers, and a case to keep them all in. We weren’t super strict but prompted them to write every few days. Sometimes they were reluctant about it. Other times they wrote about what they had been doing, an adventure they went on, who they had seeing, etc.

This year I went into summer journals with a different mindset. Instead of journal entries written as full sentence letters, I decided to get them books with blank pages to fill in a scrapbook style. Some pages will be filled with short paragraphs, notations about their day, drawings, stickers, and (new this year) photos. I picked up film for their instax polaroid cameras to allow them the freedom to take and print pictures of their adventures then add them into their journals.

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I rounded up a blank journal, tons of stickers including letters to spell out words, colorful pens, markers + crayons, and a travel toiletry case that will work perfect to hold all of the goodies. The links below will get you to these exact things, but there are plenty of ways to put together a summer journal for your kids.

The beauty of this is there is no right or wrong way. Keeping their little imaginations involved and writing is the most important part of all!