Stories of Twenty-Fifteen – Week 10

Here’s this week’s story:

Title: Gratitude Journal
Story:
When David was six, he and I both started our own gratitude journals. He was learning how to write his letters and I had read a lot about the advantages of keeping a gratitude journal so we each started one. Even though, he’s since fallen out of practice, I feel that the regular writing exercise and having a daily focus on something good was really valuable for him.

Now that Nathaniel is approaching six himself, I decided it was time for him to get his own journal. As I was buying David his graph paper notebook for math this week, I got Nathaniel a notebook with wide lines. I got him one that was bright green because green is his favorite color.

On Tuesday, he started writing daily gratitudes. So far we have: I am grateful for the swings (at school.) I am grateful for the spiderweb ( a climbing structure at school.) I am grateful for cakepops. I am grateful that I went to the movies with my friends. We missed a day so we decided to just skip it and keep going.

I was worried that Nathaniel would rebel or whine or complain but he hasn’t done any of it. He always starts with picking his item, then writing “i am grateful” and then for each word, we first spell it out loud and see what all the letters of the full word are. Once he can easily repeat all the letters, he writes the word down by himself and then we discuss the next one and on and on.

Even though he’s not falling behind in any way, I want to make sure some of the attention stays on Nathaniel’s progress. We’ve been focusing a lot on David lately because of the Tech Challenge and middle schools, etc. So this project is my way of ensuring Nathaniel gets daily writing practice.

I will also search for some math work for him and I hope to convince him to read on his own more often, too. He can definitely read now and he just needs practice. Around this time, I did the daily reading with David so maybe that’s what we need here, too. Anyhow, one step at a time and, for this week, this journal is a wonderful step forward. Three cheers for Nathaniel!

Stories of Twenty Fifteen is a project for 2015. You can read more about it here.