Get Your Kid Blogging

Ever wonder what they think of it all? When we first set off on our worldschooling journey, my two older kids were ages 6 and 8. I planned to have them do travel journaling as a simple way to maintain and advance their writing skills while also creating a keepsake record of their experiences. There would be no formal schooling for the foreseeable future, so this would be a fun and lightly academic daily activity, I thought. We equipped them with little notebooks and encouraged them to draw pictures and write a few sentences each day about what they had seen. This did not go well at all.

Despite my own nostalgic memories of hours spent happily drawing and crafting travel diaries during vacation, as a parent I discovered what a tall order it is for young children to keep a handwritten travel journal. I was asking them to reflect on their day and recall events they found worth documenting. They needed to come up with a way to encapsulate the experience in a picture and a few sentences. The task required them to formulate a linear narrative that was detailed enough to convey the story but not so thorough as to be onerously long. They needed help with spelling words, and their penmanship required slow effort, frequent erasures and repeated starts on a new page. After a few days and a lot of tears, I could see that this form of travel journaling was not going to work for any of us.

When we switched tactics and tried dictating blogs, a whole new world opened up—and with vastly higher educational value. I started taking dictation from my children one-on-one, and together we created and posted their observations to personal blogs that they could share with their friends and relatives. “Don’t mind me,” I would say, “just talk.” Some days they needed a few prompting questions, while on other days I had to ask them to slow down so that I could capture what rushed from their wide-eyed floodgates. By decoupling the formulation of meaningful narrative from the physical act of writing and spelling, we were able to work together on the storytelling, summarizing and structuring aspects of good writing. They learned how to mine their thoughts for important nuggets, get all their ideas out, consider what their audience needed in order to grasp the essence of the event, regroup their points to form a coherent narrative, shape sentences with a subject and a verb, brainstorm synonyms and details that could enrich their descriptions, and move from high-level introduction, down into the substance, and back up again to closure at 10,000 feet.

But the magic of the blogs went well beyond academics. The truth about long-term family travel is that the kids are not always enthusiastic, the headiest of sights and activities can randomly disappoint, somebody always gets tired or hungry along the way, and that vision of joyous frolicking with everyone embracing the experience is more occasional than hoped. Some days you wonder if it is all worth it or even if you might be torturing your kids with tedious educational travel that could scar them for life. Maybe it is just us, but our family's complaints and protests were depressingly abundant along the way. This is where the kids’ blogging came in—and saved us from parental despair and family memories permanently washed with negativity.

Suddenly, I (and I think even my children themselves) gained a window into what they were seeing and thinking about their experience, what held personal value for them, and all kinds of learning that I otherwise knew nothing about. The observations they expressed during our regular stream of consciousness blogging sessions frequently surprised me—often because they betrayed a lot of specific knowledge that they had picked up when I thought they were not paying any attention, and often because the positive tenor of their narrative was so different from how they acted at the time and what I expected them to say. It is true that they knew their friends might read their blog, which may have been an incentive to sound upbeat, but they also simply had a lot of thoughts and playful reactions to spill. By directing their reflections to what they would say to a friend, my kids were in a way talking to their former selves back in suburban California. In the process, I got a precious glimpse into their experiences from their rich, internal perspectives.

We blogged this way for nearly three years, ultimately covering ages 5 to 11. I parsed out my writing tips gradually at age-appropriate levels, trying to keep it fun. As time went on, they naturally expanded their storytelling, their episodes got longer and more robust, their writing skills improved, and they found it increasingly easy to do. By age 9 or 10, they were comfortable with taking the keyboard after the first draft to re-read, edit and refine their text. Now several years down the road, they delight in re-reading their blogs and talk about them with real pride. I highly recommend experimenting with some of these elements to discover what works best for your traveling family.