Embarking on a journey through the fresh eyes of a child can be a beautiful and enlightening experience and one you and your child will remember for years to come. Helping them create their own kid’s travel journal allows them to look back at photos of past adventures and is a way to help them step back in their minds.
A great kid’s travel journal has several key elements: pictures, comments, and stickers, of course. In today’s post, we’ll cover all the bases on kid’s travel journals: what they are, where to buy them, and how to use them both before and after your trip.
Kid’s Travel Journals 101
What Is A Kids Travel Journal?
A kid’s travel journal is essentially a notebook or diary in which children record their experiences, observations, and thoughts during a journey or a trip. This journal is a fantastic tool to encourage a child’s writing, observation, and reflection skills. It can include day-to-day detailed accounts of the journey, sketches, photographs, ticket stubs, pressed flowers or leaves, etc.
The purpose of a kid’s travel journal is multi-fold. Firstly, it’s a great educational tool. It encourages and promotes writing, reading, and organizational skills. They delve into geography, history, culture, and social atmospheres unconsciously, which aids in their intellectual development. Secondly, it’s a wonderful way to chronicle their journey as a tangible memory of their experiences.
From an adult’s perspective, the journal allows them to see travels from a fresh, uninhibited perspective – that of a child. But above all, it provides an opportunity to engage with children in a meaningful, fun, and creative way.
Popular Formats of a Kids Travel Journal
Different formats can be used for a kid’s travel journal. Here’s an exploration of a few popular structures that are used commonly and how to pick the right one for your child:
Structured Format Kid’s Travel Journals
In a structured format, each day or page of the journal is broken down into sections for activities, goals, things they learned, and something they found exciting or strange. This structure is quite helpful for kids who find it difficult to know where to start.
Structured format kid’s travel journals are perfect for kids that have learned to read and write and will help them develop those skills as well as the skills they’re learning in school during those years: gathering and organizing information, researching and identifying questions, and finally explaining their findings.
Scrapbook Style Kid’s Travel Journals
In the Scrapbook style, each page is a blank canvas. Here, kids can stick photos, ticket stubs, draw pictures, and write about their day. No fixed format allows kids to work on their creativity and organization skills.
Scrapbook-style kid’s travel journals are the most appropriate for kids under 6-7 as they don’t require the child to have a firm grasp on writing utensils and space utilization. To help add context for your child to these pages, consider grabbing some comment stickers that you can overlay on their designs so they can understand later what they were trying to convey and where they were.
Prompt-based Kid’s Travel Journals
Prompt-based journals provide questions or ideas on each page to ignite the thought process. It could be about drawing the most beautiful thing they encountered or writing about their favorite food. This style helps kids dig deeper into their experiences by stimulating their thoughts.
If you have older or highly-expressive children, the prompt-based kid’s style travel journals can help them unleash that creativity during and after the trip. As the child of a budding artist, one of my son’s favorite activities after a day of sightseeing is to window down with his sketch pad and draw the things he saw from his perspective.
If you’d like to explore a prompt-based style, here are a few example prompts to get you started:
- Today’s Highlight: What was the most exciting part of today?
- Learning Moments: What new things did you learn today?
- Local Lens: Did you try local foods or learn local words or customs?
- Creative Corner: Draw or doodle something you saw today.
- Wishlist: Is there something you didn’t get to do or see today that you wish to do tomorrow?
Regardless of the style chosen, ensuring the process is engaging, and fun is key to helping your child get the most out of their travel journaling journey.
Remember, a thousand-mile journey begins with a single step – or in this case, a single journal entry! So, get your child their travel journal and let the adventures begin.
3 Beautiful Kid’s Travel Journals You Can Buy Right Now
Like any other type of stationery product, you can technically purchase a kid’s travel journal anywhere you’d find a traditional journal – the pharmacy, the supermarket, stationery stores, and I’ve even seen a few at school book fairs.
Feel free to do what works for you, but there are a few things to consider before selecting size, format, and your child’s age. While it may be tempting to go straight for a scrapbook if your child is younger and more interested in the scrapbooking style of journaling, those books can become quite large and difficult for small hands to manage.
Similarly, if your child is more into prompt-based journaling, you’ll want a kid’s travel journal with legered lines for writing.
The Best Kid’s Travel Journal For Kids Ages 2 – 10
My kids love locks. I don’t know what it is, but key or not, my boys are instantly fascinated by anything that clasps, locks, or otherwise appears to be mysterious and off-limits to others, so when I was first thinking through how my children would capture the memories of our first big family vacation to Europe, I knew it needed a clasp-lock-thing.
I found this children’s adventure book travel diary on Amazon and ordered one for my boys. What I loved about it, beyond the clasp, is that this book has an excellent mix of features that are suited to both of my boy’s ages and abilities.
There’s a pocket inside to keep the stickers and overlays organized (as well as pictures that haven’t been put in yet), a mix of cool text and picture frames and standalone picture frames, and some stickers and inlays that match the theme. Finally, it has 73 pages, so my youngest can keep all the bug pictures he took in Italy.
The Best Kid’s Travel Journal For Tweens
If your child is slightly older and wants to do a mix of pictures, collectibles, and writing, I think this kid’s travel journal is ideal for tweens. While on the surface, it’s mostly geared toward travel within the U.S.A.; the binder system allows you to add additional pages for international travel.
The plastic pouches make it easy for your child to store things like currency, plane tickets, and museum tickets (like the ones at the Sistine Chapel, which are so pretty) alongside where they wrote their journal entries for that location.
The Best Kids Travel Journal For Teens
Ok, ok. We get it. You’re a teen and are SO OVER arts and crafts with your parents. You need something that looks cool. We love this faux leather embossed travel journal with refillable pages for the older kids in the house. They can still choose to glue in pictures when and where they’d like, but they also have the writing space to talk about their feelings and experiences on the go.
Wherever you buy your kid’s travel journal, ensure they’re involved whenever possible. This will allow them to maximize the personality of the aesthetics to match their unique personalities and make them much more likely to revisit the journal again and again.
Creative Ways to Incorporate a Kid’s Travel Journal Into Your Adventures
Now that we’ve covered the different styles of kid’s travel journals and where you can buy them, online or in person, here’s how to use them alongside your children.
Pre-Trip Planning With Kid’s Travel Journals
As adults, we often think of travel as an exciting experience that we’re lucky enough to have, so it might surprise you that travel, for children, can be very scary. Children have limited experiences in the world, and they thrive on routine, familiarity, and a sense of safety.
Travel offers none of those things, but traveling with children is also one of the best ways to expand their horizons, help them test their boundaries, and learn the skills they will need to succeed later on. Kid’s travel journals are one way we can help our children bridge that gap between the known and the unknown, build excitement, and create a safe space for them to lean into excitement and express their worries and fears.
If you’ve told your children you’re taking a trip together, they will likely have many questions about it. Where are we staying? Where are we going? Who will we see? What will it be like to do X?
This is the perfect opportunity to capture your child’s questions. Before my family left for our first big international trip, I wrote down each one of their questions while I also showed them pictures and videos online. I made it a point to bring my notes with me as we embarked on our first big family vacation to prompt them with those questions along the trip, which led me into our next phase.
My children’s questions before we traveled had answers, but those answers were almost irrelevant to them because my children lacked the experience to put them into digestible context. For example, we flew to Europe for a cruise last April. My youngest son had been on an airplane for the first time once before, and he was familiar with the airport, but he was extremely distressed to learn that this flight would be far, far longer.
Where will I sleep? How will I eat? I don’t like peeing on airplanes! The t.v. was broken last time… Although I took the time to answer each of his questions, the only flight he had ever been on was a cheap economy flight that took ~4 hours and had a mid-flight layover, so it always felt like we were either taking off or landing to him.
While I explained the lay-flat seating we would enjoy, how the food options worked on international flights, and that we’d have a comfortable place to sleep, he couldn’t intellectualize that until he experienced it. He chose This picture for his kid’s travel journal about taking a very long plane ride.
Getting to (and home from) your destination might be the biggest hurdle for those traveling with children, especially if you’re a single parent traveling alone with your children, but it’s certainly not the end of your family’s travel journey.
Creating Content For Your Kid’s Travel Journal During Your Vacation
There’s not a one-size fits all way to capture all of the interesting things your children will find along the way, as I learned first-hand in my travels. While it may be tempting to tell your children that you’ll take pictures of things on your phone, it can be frustrating when you need to stop every 20 seconds to pull out your phone so that your child can get a picture of something they find riveting; they must be able to capture their own memories of your travels.
Digital cameras are cheap these days; many are shock-resistant, water-resistant, and willing to withstand small children’s abuse. They’re also invaluable at helping your children capture the essence of what they’re seeing and interested in while your family is exploring a new destination.
Ensure that your child has the accessories and instruments necessary to capture their experiences during the trip so that they have something to put in their kid’s travel journal when everyone arrives home.
Adding Your Artifacts to Your Kid’s Travel Journal After The Trip
If you’re anything like me, the first thing you do after getting home from a vacation with your children is laundry. Unpack the bags, get everything clean, and let everyone decompress for a few days. Once that’s done, however, you must follow up on what your children gathered for their kid’s travel journey along the way.
My advice is to pick a Saturday or Sunday afternoon after you’ve been back for a while and go through all of the artifacts your child saved during the vacation. These can include things like tickets, pictures, coins, souvenirs, or other items that are important to them.
For photos, I usually upload all of my children’s photos to someplace like Shutterfly. I then will go through each photo with my child and determine what they’d like to keep and what they’d like to throw away. When we’ve reached the end, I clearly show them the checkout process so they know those pictures will be in their hands within a couple of weeks.
When we have everything from our trip, it’s time for them to start working on their kid’s travel journal for that vacation. On the first rainy day we have, we’ll all spend an hour or two looking at the collected artifacts, figuring out how we want to display them in their books, gluing them in, and adding any additional comments or prompt answers that were recorded.
When we’re done, each child has a book for each big travel adventure that we’ve taken with their images, drawings, answers, comments, and designs.
In conclusion
The world seen through the lens of a child’s travel journal can be a colorful swirl of adventure, discovery, and unbridled imagination. Creating and maintaining these journals not only shapes a child’s perception of the world but also aids in honing their writing, observation, and analytical skills.
Armed with the knowledge and techniques laid out, you can now experiment with creating your own kid’s travel journal for your children and your family’s next big adventure. Like all things, there’s no single right way to do it. Remember that refinement is part of the process. Here’s to helping your children create, shape, and record the memories they love about the special times you spent together.