PaperBased.net

I love those quiz lists that come around in the email and on sites such as MySpace. They are such a quick and easy way to sum up exactly where you are at a certain period in your life. Yes - some of the questions can be a bit silly and don’t really search that deep, but I still find it quite revealing when I go back and re-read my answers a few months or even a few years down the track.

With this in mind I have created a printable one page list of journal prompt questions to sum up the last 3 months.

Download Printable Journal Prompts - The Last 3 Months

Two sources I need to credit for sparking the idea for this template:

A post on MetaFilter that asked about good questions to ask ourselves once a year. Check out the responses to the post as there are some great prompts/questions to ponder there.

A post on the Embodiment Livejournal Community by red_sleeve who printed out a 500 Question quiz, filled in her answers and placed it in an envelope inside her journal. The idea was that she could read the list in a years time. A cool idea and the envelope in her journal looked great too!

As the end of 2007 is just around the corner I’ve been spending some time reviewing my goals list and working on some new ones for 2008.

Being a paperbased type of person, I prefer to use a paper and pen to do this (although I do have to admit a love of the site 43Things, both for the community atmosphere and the tonnes of great goal ideas you can browse through).

Over time I have managed to find some really useful worksheets that can be printed to provide some structure to goal setting activities. Here are a few of them:

• The awesome 101 Goals in 1001 Days website has a heap of printable worksheets for brainstorming goals and putting a list  together.
• The Goal Setting Guide on Uncommon Knowledge has a good goal worksheet layout
• LIFT International has some great visually appealing goal and life plan worksheets 
• The Bloomington Public Schools website has a nice simple SMART Goals template
• Here’s another SMART Goals worksheet from Optimus Performance
• And another SMART Goals worksheet from Coachville/ExcellentCoach
• The Executive Assistant’s Toolbox has a very useful Goal Tracker template available
• The IdeaBridge Goal Tracking Template is another useful tool. Their website has a tonne of other great business-orientated templates available as well.
• A Financial Goals worksheet from Utah Sate University. There’s other financial worksheets available too.
• Here’s a Goals Worksheet for Students from the University of Wisconsin - Eau Claire
• For those more into using Mind Maps to plan goals, Eric Blue’s Blog has loads of great resources including a goals mind map template

Recently a friend returned from a trip to Japan with hundreds of holiday snaps of his travels and adventures there. Some of these photos were of the statue of Sadako Sasaki (The Children’s Monument) in Hiroshima’s Peace Park. The statue is of a young girl holding aloft a large golden crane. It is surrounded by thousands of colourful folded paper cranes that are brought and sent to the city each year by children from around the world.

I remembered reading the story of Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes (an historical fiction novell written by Eleanor Coerr in 1977 and based on the collection of letters between Sadako and her classmates) for school and being very touched by the story of this courageous girl. The story revolves around Sadako, a 12 year old girl who is dying of leukaemia as a result of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima when she was only two years old. She hears that if you fold 1000 paper cranes you get to make one wish, so she begins folding with the wish to be made well again.

Sadako’s determination inspired her classmates to start a national campaign to remember her and the hundreds of other children killed in the bombing. Sadako and her paper cranes have since become a symbol of peace.

When reading this book in class we had also learnt how to fold the paper cranes. This was the activity that started my love of paper folding and origami. After seeing my friend’s photos of the paper cranes in the peace park it prompted me to revisit the story and to learn to fold a paper crane again.

If you’d like to read more about the real Sadako you can find her story at the World Peace Project for Children website or the Sadako Sasaki Wikipedia entry. Both sites contain photographs of the peace statue and of the many paper cranes placed around it.

Instructions for folding your own paper crane can be found at the following sites:

• World Peace Project for Children - Folding Paper Cranes
• World Peace Project for Children - Other Paper Crane Instructions
• Animated Origami Crane Instructions (requires Flash)
• Operation Peace Crane

What is a Response Journal you ask?  It’s basically a journal of responses to something you are reading.  This site explains it as:

Keeping a response journal will give you an opportunity to express your own opinions about what is happening in the novel you are reading. Passages that upset you, make you happy, or that you simply do not understand, can be discussed in your journal entries.

The site also has a great list of prompts to use.  A similar resource, titled "What is a response journal?", is available at Instructional Strategies Online.  This site includes a number of PDF templates to download and print.

Busy Teacher’s Cafe has a great bookmark template of simple response journal prompts.  You can view the PDF template here.  Print one out and use it as a bookmark in the next book you read.  You can jot down notes on it as you read.

Some more prompts and some tips on writing a response journal can be found in the Lesson Bank at Teachers.net .  There’s also a very nice list at brtom.org, these ones are more for older kids and adults - they are well written and will really get you thinking.

The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World represent great works of ancient times that embody the best of mythology, religion, art, power, science and beauty.  They are, in chronological order:

• The Great Pyramid of Giza
• The Hanging Gardens of Babylon
• The Statue of Zeus at Olympia
• The Temple of Artemis at Ephesus
• The Mausoleum of Maussollos at Halicarnassus
• The Colossus of Rhodes
• The Lighthouse of Alexandria

Sadly only the Pyramid at Giza is still standing today, the others all having been destroyed by natural disaster.  You can read more about the Seven Wonders at Wikipedia.

What are the seven wonders of your life?  List them out and write about what makes them a wonder for you.

Image courtesy of the stock.xchng

I noticed that a lot of the hits on my journal writing prompts lens were coming from Google with search terms like “journal prompts for kids” and “writing prompts for kids”.  There were so many hits like this that I decided to set up a second lens specifically focused on prompts for kids and A Goldmine of Journal Writing Prompts for Kids is the end result. 

Currently there’s only about ten links to prompt resources and a few more links to articles on the benefits of journaling for kids.  The resources listed all have great collections of prompts though and are well worth a visit.  Expect this resource to grow much larger over the next few weeks as I find and add more links.

And of course, don’t forget the original lens if you are after journaling prompts more suitable for adults - A Goldmine of Journal Writing Prompts.