Travel Notebooking with Lindsay L. Ward

Notebooking has been an important part of our homeschool since the beginning of our homeschooling journey. We started with nature journaling occasionally when my oldest two children were in their early years, and we grew into other forms of keeping as they got older.  

When packing and preparing for a family road trip a few years ago, I knew I wanted to nature journal with the children as we explored other states; however, I wanted to keep it simple while traveling and not make nature journaling a cumbersome task during our trip. I recalled an idea my friends brought back from a CMI conference in 2018 (I hadn’t been able to attend). Laura Gastinger had shared some of her travel journaling ideas, and my friends knew I would love the inspiration. I decided to purchase an accordion watercolor journal for our trip that our family could share. During the trip, we all contributed to the nature journal, including my husband and our youngest at the time, a one year old! We tried to have each person add one entry per day during the trip. Not only did the journal allow us to connect with the nature we observed on our trip, it also became our favorite souvenir and started a travel tradition for our family!  

We have now created many of these travel journals from our family trips over the years. And while they started as nature journals, we have broadened the scope to include history, art, and architecture as our kids’ interests have expanded with their ages.  

This past summer, in preparing for a European trip with our family, my oldest children (15 and 13) expressed the desire to keep a personal travel journal instead of a family journal. Wanting to support and help cultivate their personal journeys with journaling, we supplied each of us (my husband and I shared one) with a water color journal to document our travels for the trip. I carefully selected journaling supplies that we could bring along to share. One new addition to our supplies was a tiny printer to allow us to add in photos from our day. The time we spent working on these journals created a sweet evening routine through our travels in Paris, the Lake District, and London. After dinner in our Airbnb, we would gather around the table to draw, paint, print photos, and reflect on our day.  I loved to see how each of my children curated their daily pages, to see what they connected with that day, and to watch them create a meaningful keepsake from our adventure!  

I love how notebooking has helped our family live out “education is a life.”  Learning isn’t isolated to the hours of homeschooling lessons, and bringing notebooking along on our travels has allowed us to learn and connect with new places and experiences in a beautiful, life-giving way!