Journaling

CATEGORY: PERSONAL
LEVEL: FOUNDATIONS

Why:

Journaling is a powerful practice for self-awareness, helping us make sense of our life story.

Warm-Up:

Try writing a journal entry. This is just for you. You can share some, all, or none of it with the group. You could answer the prompt, "one thing on my mind is…’ or, "something I want to remember about today is..."

Exploration:

Starting a journal is like gaining a new best friend. In your journal you can pour out your heart and your experiences, and as you do that you may start to see your life more clearly. Journaling gives you a record of your memories to look back on, with patterns that might give you hints about how you have grown and how you could continue to grow. It almost lets you time-travel, able to write to yourself in the future, to connect with yourself in the past, and feel a sense of being on an adventure through life.

Additional Resources

As an optional extension, you can invite students to use the website www.futureme.org, which will allow them to write an email and have it delivered to themselves at any future date. This is a way to experience the magical time-travel quality of journaling, and to add extra motivation to the journal challenge today. They could write their journal entry on a computer, and then paste it into the FutureMe email, setting the delivery date to be 6 months, a year, or even further into the future.