Student journaling to reflect on school subjects and/or unique ideas is a powerful and proven tool. Several of my posts cover this topic of student journals/planners. I recently ran across a company called Big Life Journal that provides journals based on SEL and aspects of Positive Psychology. I will be ordering copies to review but what I am seeing on the website looks good regarding the prompts, topics, and templates that can help students grow their self-understanding while adding “tools” to their personal wellness toolkits.
An essential part of my working with parents is to give them parenting materials that include strategies and templates to put them in the role of a life coach for their children. Hopefully, the Big Life journals for elementary and middle/high school students can be a helpful addition to my parent coaching toolkit.
Our Wellness Team could design educational materials and workshops to help parents use journals to support their children’s coaching. I could see my subsequent school purchasing copies for all students or promoting the idea of parents buying the books. I could also see using the parent portal wellness section to house the tutorials and the community wellness blog to post weekly strategies for using the journals.
Another approach could be to go through the school wellness program to have classroom teachers in the elementary assigning tasks in the journals for students to do in class and/or at home, depending on how the school uses the journal. My vote would be for home use with a possible teacher/parent partnership as a big part of the effort to grow parent understanding of how to support their children’s emotional, social, and general wellness growth.
Again, I don’t have a copy of the book, but I wonder if they have a digital wellness and/or citizenship section. I think these topics would need their own book as they are related to emotional and social well-being but are more in applying one’s emotional and social intelligence character strengths.
My current parents are very open to parenting guidance on wellness, the use of technology/media, and how their children interact with others via technology. I wonder if Common Sense Media has some form of workbook/journal for at-home use.
