As humans, our ability to communicate with each other is a crucial part of our everyday lives. From learning to express thoughts to improving spelling and reading comprehension, journaling is a daily activity that can strengthen your child’s communication skills. Here’s why you should encourage your child to journal every single night.

Strengthen Communication

Journaling helps to strengthen both writing skills and communication. By writing down their day, your child will begin to have an early understanding of their emotions, express those thoughts meaningfully, and learn how to process events. Writing in a journal allows your child to take a realistic assessment of a situation and even learn to see all sides of a situation — a skill that is not only useful in day-to-day life, but also in education. Seeing other sides of an argument helps your child to develop their reasoning skills, debate skills, and can even help them learn to write argumentative essays. 

Improve Reading Comprehension

An essential life skill, journaling can help your child improve their reading comprehension. By writing in a journal, your child will read and reread their entries, learning to understand what they’ve written and build their reading skills. Re-reading can even help them learn to find and correct any errors. 

Stimulate Creativity

Storytelling helps to form essential neural pathways that are associated with creativity. Journaling helps to build these skills. If your child is feeling stuck on writing, encourage them with creative prompts where they can use their imagination to encourage their entry. 

Improve Attention to Detail

When your child rereads their entries, they’re going to notice whether words are spelled correctly, whether sentences make sense when they are read back, or whether they truly captured what they were trying to say. Journaling helps to improve your child’s attention to detail, including things like spelling, word choice, and even punctuation. They’ll see how the smallest things can have a huge impact on what they were trying to say, and as they continue to write, they will pay close attention to what they are saying.

Regular journaling provides your child with an outlet to express themselves freely while improving their communication skills. And getting started is simple! All you need is a notebook and a pen. When journaling, allow your child to have privacy and let them know that this is their journal and that they are free to express themselves. For more ideas on sparking creativity, check out the Lake Forrest Prep, a private school in Orlando, blog.