Journaling Can Help A Pre-teen Become More Aware of Their Environment

There are many things in and around our lives that we can write about in our journals. As you may have seen in other journaling articles we can write about events that we are involved with or about how those events affect us. We can also write about the people who are involved in our lives and how we can be affected by them.

But there are other things like nature, for example, that we can write about in our journals too. And what’s good about writing about nature is that it helps us develop a deeper awareness and compassion for our environment.

Here’s how writing in a journal about our environment will help increase your pre-teen’s awareness.

What Did Your Pre-teen See Today?

What did your pre-teen see today is a question that will cause them to observe their environment much more closely. Parents can actually encourage their pre-teens to write this very question in their journal and then answer it as a way to start their daily journal writing.

Over time and with practice your pre-teen will begin to look for something different in their environment to write about. For example, maybe your pre-teen notices a bird’s nest in the tree in your backyard one day and a few days later sees a mother bird feeding her chicks in the same nest. These are actually two different observations on two different days taking place in the same location. By your pre-teen writing in their journal about both they train themselves to become more observant about what they are examining.

What Does Your Pre-Teen Remember About Their Day?

What your pre-teen remembers about their day can become another way to start their daily journaling process. As we go about our daily activities there is nearly an endless amount of things going on around us, and some of it is so common to us that we have trained ourselves to ignore it. The birds singing early in the morning or the busy morning traffic rushing down the street are good examples of the things we may choose to tune out because we have become so used to them that we have lost our focus.

Writing in a journal about what we remember from our day can help us to bring the routine events going on around us back into focus. Police officers, for example, are trained to remember as many details of a picture they will see for only a brief moment and then write about it. This same principle may be applied to journaling for the pre-teen who wants to become more aware of their environment. When we bring the mundane everyday things back into focus we are training ourselves to become more aware of our surroundings.

As all parents should know being aware of one’s environment is very important for many different reasons. Parents can help their pre-teens increase their awareness by encouraging them journal about what they see in their environment.