Attitude of Gratitude: How to Add a Gratitude Journal to your Classroom

A few years back, I went to a 3-day conference to see Eric Jensen (author of Teaching with Poverty in Mind & Engaging Students with Poverty in Mind) in San Antonio, Texas.  Beautiful place and exteremly hot and humid there in July!

I learned so much during the conference, took pages and pages of notes, and couldn't wait to get started with EVERYTHING!  But, wait!  Past experience had taught me that you can't jump into everything at once.  I knew I needed to pick one new piece of learning and apply that and only that to my classroom in the fall.  Manageable.  Doable.

It wasn't hard to decide on building a sense of gratitude.  The research on the physical and mental health benefits are well-documented. I also knew I had enough time in a time-pressed school day (at the end of breakfast) to add in some time for journaling.

I found these catchy titles on the internet, "Grati-Tuesday" and "Thankful Thursday" - and that made it easy to remember what days we were going to be journaling.  This August, I will start my third year of using Gratitude Journals and thought it was about time I shared them with you.  Denise