Every year, around the third week of school, I hand out the same assignment, and every year, I watch the same faces fall. Thirty-one fifth graders stare at the blank page in front of them. Thirty-one pencils hover. And then a hand shoots up from the back, usually belonging to a kid named Milo or a kid named Chloe, who asks the question I’ve been waiting for.
“Why are we doing this again?”
It’s the daily journal. Ten minutes of silent writing at the start of the day. No prompts, no word counts, no penalties for misspelled words. Just a blank page and a pen. To a ten-year-old who has mastered the art of the five-paragraph essay, it feels like standing in an empty room with a list of things to do and no instructions.
Honestly, for the first few years I taught, I agreed with them. I couldn’t see the point either. I’d collect the notebooks on Fridays, flip through the pages, and find a lot of half-hearted entries about video games and sleepovers and one kid who drew a detailed map of a fictional island and wrote “The End” in tiny letters at the bottom. I felt like I was grading anxiety instead of writing.
So one year, I decided to cut it. I told myself we needed the time for grammar, for reading comprehension, for actual curriculum. I replaced the pink slip of journal time with a worksheet on figurative language. The kids didn’t even notice. That should have been the end of it.
But then something strange happened. We were reading a story about a boy who moves to a new town, and I asked the class to write a short paragraph from the main character’s perspective. Just a quick warm-up. No big deal. And I had a handful of students who simply froze. Their papers were blank. They had ideas—they told me as much—but they couldn’t get the words from their heads to the page. The sentences they managed to write were stiff, formal, and cautious. It was like watching someone try to speak a foreign language using only a phrasebook.
I realized what had happened. I had stripped away the only time they had to just write without worrying about the grade, the structure, the “right” answer. I had taken away the low-stakes practice and replaced it with high-stakes prompts. Their brains were so busy trying not to make mistakes that there was no room left for thinking.
So the journals came back the next year. But I changed the way we used them.
The first change was the most important. I decided I would write with them. Not walk around the room, not check email at my desk, not grade yesterday’s papers. I sat down with my own notebook and wrote. At first, the kids couldn’t handle it. They kept looking up to see if I was watching them. But after a few days, they got used to it. We were all just people, sitting in a room, trying to put a few thoughts down.
The second change was that I stopped reading everything. On Fridays, I would ask them to put a star next to one entry they wanted me to read. Everything else was private. They could write about a fight they had with a friend, a dream they had, or a completely made-up story about a dragon who runs a bakery in a small town. If nothing was starred, that was fine too. The only true requirement was that the pen had to move for ten minutes.
The third change was that I stopped correcting spelling. I know that sounds small, but it was a big deal for a teacher. We’re practically trained to see errors. But nothing kills the desire to write faster than a red pen. I told them this: the journal is not the place for perfect. The journal is the place for thinking out loud.
And slowly, something shifted.
The kid named Milo, the one who asked why we were doing this, started writing long, rambling entries about his Minecraft world. He described building a castle out of blocks, losing his diamond sword, and his great plan to build a redstone elevator. The grammar was rough. The paragraphs were non-existent. But the voice—the voice was completely his own.
The girl who always finished first started using the journal to work through problems. She wrote about being nervous for the spelling bee, about fighting with her best friend at lunch, about the test she was sure she failed. It wasn’t polished, and it wasn’t always coherent, but she was moving her thoughts forward on paper, untangling them in a way she never could in a whole-class discussion.
One day, I read an entry from a quiet kid named Sam. It was about his grandmother’s dog. How the dog had to be put down last weekend. How he felt silly for crying about it. He had never raised his hand to share anything personal before. But he had written it, and he had starred it, and when I handed it back with a short note that said, “I am sorry about your dog,” he nodded and put the notebook in his backpack.
I don’t want to make this sound like a miracle. The journals didn’t fix everything. Milo still struggled with formal writing, and his essay about the American Revolution was honestly a bit of a train wreck. Sam went back to being quiet the next week. And there were still mornings where kids stared at the wall and wrote three words in ten minutes and called it a day.
But here’s what I noticed. The kids who journaled regularly became more willing to write in other contexts. They were less afraid of the blank page. They were more willing to make mistakes because they knew they could fix them later. They had practice with the most difficult part of writing: simply getting started.
There’s a lot of debate about homework, about screen time, about which apps are good and which are a waste. I can’t speak to all of that. But I can tell you that this particular “waste of time” has a purpose. It’s not about becoming a great writer, though that might happen. It’s about becoming a person who has a relationship with their own thoughts. A person who can sit with an idea long enough to see where it goes.
The structure is simple. You can do it at home too. Ten minutes after dinner, everyone sits down with a notebook. No devices, no music, no talking. You write about what you’re thinking about, what you’re worried about, what you’re planning. It doesn’t have to be good. It just has to be.
It’s not easy to get started. The first week will feel awkward. Your kid will complain. You might complain, too. But after a few days, the routine kicks in. The brain starts expecting that little pocket of time. It starts preparing for it.
Milo didn’t thank me at the end of the year. He didn’t say, “That daily writing was really valuable, Mrs. Davis.” He just turned in his final essay, a fictional narrative about a samurai who has to choose between revenge and forgiveness. It had a solid structure, a clear theme, and a few sentences that genuinely surprised me. He had learned to write. Not because I taught him how, but because he had practiced in the dark, ten minutes at a time.
I still don’t know if the daily journal is the absolute best use of our morning. I question it every year, especially when the schedule feels tight. But I keep it on the plan book, and I keep writing alongside them. Because I’ve learned that sometimes the things that feel like a waste of time are the things that actually make the rest of the time possible.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » Every year, around the third week of school, I hand out the same assignment, and every year, I watch the same faces fall