Journaling has always been an important part of my life beginning in the 1970's - when I was in my early teen years. By writing about whatever exciting or meaningful that was happening in my life, I could experience it all over again! Whenever I had a problem, I leaned heavily upon my quiet journaling time to 'get my head together'. When I journaled through a difficult time, slowly and thoughtfully writing my thoughts, it helped me to get a more realistic feel for the size of my problem. When I was done, I could even physically hold my problem in my hand. I would have a new perspective - one I could live with. I could start counting my blessings instead of my problems.
Because of the personal growth I had experienced through journaling I knew in 1992, when I began home schooling my children, that I wanted to include journaling as part of our curriculum. When I first began home schooling I would, with fond affection, journal one piece of 'motherly advice' per day for my daughter Ashley to read along with her daily Bible lesson. As our first school year of homeschooling progressed, I began to ask her to instead write down her thoughts on a significant topic. I learned somewhere that children remember about 10% of what they hear, 50% of what they see, and 90% of what they do. I knew if my children wrote about virtue, it would be an engaging, hands-on, spiritually meaningful exercise that would be retained in their hearts and minds.
In 2000 when Ashley went off to college, my two younger children, Zachary and Clarissa (Kiki), were getting to the age when they could also begin to journal. I purchased a number of devotion style journals, but feeling a bit like goldilocks, there was always something about them that for us was not 'just right'. Some seemed merely self-explorative rather than Biblically based. None contained all the values that I wanted to pass on to my dear children.
Realizing that a journal such as I had in mind did not exist, I began to make a list of every concept related to virtue that I could think of that would benefit my children. Next, I began turning this list into a collection of writing prompts. For more ideas I went through every page of my Bible for scriptures that I had highlighted over the past 20 years. As the list of writing prompts grew to 400, I began to realize that this fresh and unique approach to instilling morality was not one that I wanted to keep to myself, and more children than my own should be blessed by this opportunity for spiritual development.
I divided the writing prompts into four groups of 100 each, according to age appropriateness. I then meticulously searched for the perfect verse to go with each prompt, and compared translations for each verse, finding 100 different and beautiful scriptures for each of the four volumes. The whole process has taken about four years, but with the help of friends, seeing the finished product come together and anticipating the benefit it will have in the lives of young people, is very exciting.
Throughout our years of homeschooling we would usually spend the first thirty minutes of our school day every morning journaling. The first fifteen minutes, we spend recording in one journal the events of the previous day, and the next fifteen minutes my kids write in a second journal, and that journal is Journaling Toward Moral Excellence. Every day, when Zachary and Clarissa had completed their journals, we review them together and discuss whatever may be on their minds. We also go over any spelling or grammar needs that the journals reveal. My children have now completed their homeschooling, and through time we have accumulated quite a collection of essays. We know the older these journal entries get, the more fascinating they will become to my children and maybe even their children one day.
Journaling Toward Moral Excellence is such a quiet and lovely way to start the day, my prayer is that other families, home schooling and otherwise, will enjoy and find these journals a blessing.
Cordially,
Cindy Dunagan
Journaling Toward Moral Excellence
