My husband and I have been journaling our vacations since we first got married. For major trips, we always purchase a new journal and they vary with our tastes at the time and where we are going. Now that my children are old enough to keep journals of sorts, I want to make sure that I encourage it.

We are gearing up for a nine day, 2099 mile road trip that is going to take us up and down the East coast. Instead of purchasing a journal for the kids, I made them myself! It probably would have been more cost effective to just purchase a spiral notebook, but these aren’t just any plain old journals!

To get started I searched the web for their favorite shows and characters. On each website, I found coloring sheets of their favorite characters. I printed these along with word searches and hidden puzzle pages. I printed an age appropriate car bingo for both kids and a list of the states for my son to spy license plates. I also printed a map of the United States and marked the cities that we will be stopping in. Then I printed off enough journal pages for the whole the trip, as well as some extra pages for more journaling. One thing to note about printing: To save paper, I ran the different pages off on both sides. In the back of the book, I added a stack of blank pages so that they can color or journal if they would like. Now that it is all ready to go, all I need to do is staple it together or take it to an office supply store to have it bound!

For the journal pages, I used Donna Young: Printables and Resources. You can print off handwriting pages of all different rules. My kids are 3 and 5 so I chose the journal paper that has the blank section at the top of the page for coloring a picture.

I think my kids are going to be so surprised and excited when I hand the journals into the back of the minivan! After our trip, I will let you know what was a hit and what was not! Do you encourage your children to journal on their travels?

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