 Hey everybody, welcome to the Waldoch Way. I'm Jessica, and today's video is going to be how we journal in our home school. Now, if you follow us on social media, you have seen that we have started journaling in our home school as something I have shared about, and you have all expressed great interest in learning more about it. Now, previously every single Monday in our home school, we would do what we called Mail Time Monday, which I will link a video right here if you're not sure what that is because we talk all about it and even take you on a Mail Time Monday with us. But what we have done in 2022 is add in journaling. It's something that I just really wanted to do with Emily. I wanted to kind of inspire her to write a little bit more and I needed a way to make it fun and encourage her to write, but still make it worth her sitting down and doing it. I needed it to be something that we would do side by side because she likes doing things with me versus just herself. And I also really love the idea of reflecting back and seeing all these things that we had done during the year. And I wanted to also celebrate the little things, right? So we always get caught up in like the big things and I feel like we miss the little things that maybe mean more in the long run, you know, the little things end up being the big things. And I just thought journaling would be a great way to do that. So what we've started doing is we still sit down together every Monday and we alternate. So we do a mail time Monday, one Monday and then the next week we do a journal Monday. And so now we just call Monday's mom and me time because we sit down and do something special together. But I wanted to kind of show you the things that we use for our journaling time, the way that we do it. And then I'm going to actually bring you along on a Monday journal session with us so you can kind of get a behind the scenes look. So the first things that we start with obviously are our journals. We have two identical journals. These are from Walmart, they're $8. I will leave a link in the description box. I was very picky when I bought journals and I can tell you all of the things I wanted. The first thing I wanted was one of the elastic bands because we put pictures in here and so I knew it would potentially get really fat and I would need a way to keep it closed. I also wanted lines because Emily prefers that there are lines in a journal for her to write on. And then I don't know if you can see it or not but I also wanted the month and the dates up here at the top for us to be able to circle or highlight to make it easy because sometimes we're not journaling a specific day. We might be journaling for a full week. This is what we did this week. And so I just wanted, here is an example you can see where I highlighted the week that I was talking about in that entry. So those were kind of my prerequisites when I was looking for journals and also these are a good size. These were like, I think five and a half by eight and a half. So they weren't tiny but they also weren't huge because I didn't want Emily staring at this giant eight and a half by 11 piece of paper staring back at her like, oh my gosh, what do I write? And so this kind of makes it a little bit more doable for her. The pins that we use in our journal are the PaperMate flares because this is something special. It was new to Emily. It was a type of pin that we have not used yet. So it made it fun. It also is very vibrant and bright. And I don't have to worry about like with the friction pins, them erasing and the heat or something like that. I can store these and look back on them years from now. They also do not bleed through. So they're very vibrant and bright. You can see that here. But then if I flip the page, you can see that there's no bleed through from that pin. The other thing that we use is washi tape. We use a lot of washi tape and stickers. And what I do for that is I just pull our Meltime Monday box out. Like I said, if you haven't seen that video, you really should watch it. But we have a Sterilite container full of things like washi tape and stickers. And so I'm trying to undo it. I just set these all out on the table open and we just pick whatever we want. So there's some washi tape. Actually we have two washi tape and two stickers. And I just collect stickers from all over. Like when places have a mark down, the Dollar Tree, Michaels, I just grab stickers from wherever. We don't use super expensive stickers or anything like that. And then the last thing that we use a ton is the HP Sprocket. So this is a little tiny, like it's smaller than the size of my hand, printer. And it prints two by three sticker pictures. So they automatically are stickers and you just peel the back off. It is zero ink technology. Think of it like a Polaroid. So you never have to put ink in it again. And I can just print via Bluetooth from my phone. So essentially we will sit down to journal together. And the first thing we'll do is kind of look back at, okay, we're gonna journal a day, a week, you know, what timeframe do we want to journal? And then we both scroll through my phone. We just scroll through the gallery on my phone and we're like, okay, these are the three pictures or the six pictures or however many pictures we really want to print, whatever it looks like. You know, this is what we want to do. And we just print them all out. And then we sit down together and we simply add them to our journal. Like you can see sometimes I've printed two and used two. Sometimes I've printed four or five and used multiple. Same thing with hers. And I will turn you around in just a minute and actually give you a close up look of our journals so that you can see a little bit better. But you can see sometimes she uses more, sometimes she uses less. She loves stickers and washi tape and making it pretty. And I love that this is encouraging her to write. I love that we get to spend the time together. I have loved looking through her eyes because like one day I was like, what are we gonna journal about? And she's like, oh, I know. And she literally journaled about us journaling together and her doing science with Kevin. She said me and daddy did a science experiment together and it was so much fun. Really everything is so much fun. I think life is awesome because my parents make it awesome. Me and mommy did journaling together and we talked about our last trip to Gamble Rogers. Like that is not something I would have even thought was worthy of a journal entry, but she put it in here and it was just really, really awesome to be able to see life through her eyes and to see that it really is the little things that make up the big things. You know, the littlest things make up the most impact. And I just love that 10, 15, 20 years from now I'm gonna have these journals to look back through of all of our moments together. So it's really great because I get to count in as homeschool, but it's so, so much more than that. Okay, before I get choked up, I'm gonna turn you around. I'm gonna show you inside our journals so you can get a little bit of a better look and then you are going to join us for a journal session so you can kinda see what it looks like in our homeschool. Here is a quick flip through of a few of the pages Emily's done in her journal so far. And here is a quick flip through of a few of mine. You enjoyed learning more about how we journal in our homeschool and being able to join us for a journaling session. And now I would love to know if you journal with your kids and if so, what are some of the supplies that you use? And if you don't journal with your kids, is this something that you think that you'll be adding to your days now? Please let me know in the comments down below.