Trip Journal

Today, we finally got around to journalling last year's trip. This is part of our prep for what we'll be doing this fall: finishing the rest of the Great Canadian Road Trip. Yes, folks, later this year, we will be headed for the east coast.

Hopefully, we'll journal along the way this time, then put the finishing touches on when we get back. It'll be much less overwhelming. However, I have so much help and enthusiasm, we're whipping through it (at a snail's pace--"Don't put scissors in your mouth." "Please don't step on the pictures...").

This was an idea from a homeschooling magazine I read recently--can't remember which one right now. It was either Homeschooling Today or Homeschooling Horizons. The writer enthusiastically remembered scrapbooking her way through family vacations with her sisters. Not necessarily keeping a traditional diary, just making a collection of mementos and scattered thoughts.

We began by getting an old atlas and a hardcover journal. I cut out the provinces from the Canada map in the atlas. We decided to journal chronologically (where we actually went) rather than province by province, since we got to the west coast last. It didn't make sense to start there.

I made a title page for the whole trip, then a title page for the first part of it. I glued Saskatchewan and Alberta in place and marked our travel route on them with contrasting pen and highlighter for good measure.

We printed off some of our digital photos, and I made several maple-leaf-themed templates. Some for photos, and one for them to write a few thoughts on. We trimmed pictures with great creativity (and new scissors! Joy!!), jotted down favourite events and memories, and created layouts before gluing them into place.

Even Brat Boy filled out his own entry, writing "bunny" and "T-rex." (The bunny came into our campsite on the second night. First the kids fed it, then they chased it. Typical.)

I went back to my old blog posts from last year and printed them off, with a few edits. These made up the actual travel log for our Alberta segment. To make sure I could glue it in, I opted to space the paragraphs wide, print it on half-pages, and do some artful paper-tearing to fit things in the journal.

The result is a family collaboration that looks lovely so far, and contains the individual thoughts and memories of each of us. It's not really Daddy's kind of thing, so I doubt he'll contribute. We may convince him to after awhile, just so as to have some of him in the pages too.

Though they're outside on the trampoline, bouncing out their pent-up excitement about the upcoming plans, they assured me they want to continue working on the project. Skills have included:

• creative writing
• spelling (they each had a mistake or two and a question or two)
• copywork (Squirrelly Girlie wanted to write "my favourite things in Alberta" just the way I did)
• dictation ("Banana, tell Brat Boy how to spell T-rex while I print the bunny picture.")
• art
  
• co-operative tasking
  
• fine motor skills for the little ones