DIY Summer Journals

School is officially out for Summer! Well..spring, maybe? I don't know what to call this stupid Minnesota weather, but it's definitely NOT summer. 

With school being out, I worry about the boys losing some of their skills, with my main concern being writing. Each of my boys have something they need to work on this summer with their writing and I don't want those bad habits to get worse!

I went to the Dollar store and picked up some hard cover notebooks with the idea of having the boys keep journals of our summer fun. 

 Obviously, I needed to jazz them up. Plain is boring and I despise boring. I used my Silhouette to print/cut out some stickers.  I could have used scrapbook stickers, but I'll take any excuse to use my Silhouette that I can.

 If you've ever kept a journal then you know that some days you need a little help with what to write. I decided to print out some journal prompts for those days. I pieced a list of about 30 ideas with a few different sites I found online. Mostly Here and Here. 

I needed somewhere to store the journal prompts. I had a few random ideas, but none of them seemed practical. I finally came across some random envelopes that fit perfectly inside of the notebooks. I glued them to the inside of the front page, slipped the slips of paper in and tucked the flap inside to keep the prompts in.

 Dawson seems to be having issues with spacing his letters and words. He writes so fast that some words are run together, some letters in words have big gaps so they look like 2 words. In kindergarten his teacher gave him a popsicle stick to help with the spacing. It worked really well for him and I'm going to resort back to it for the summer to see if we can get him to improve on that.

I also picked up some mechanical pencils and extra lead from the dollar store.My Monsters seem to have a strange obsession with mechanical pencils.

Didn't they turn out cute? I'm excited to see what the kids write in them. 

All in all each journal cost me about $1.50, give or take a bit. $1 for the journals, a 4 pack of pencils for $1. Plus the stickers and envelopes. Not bad for a summer of torturing my kids with a small bit of daily "school work"!