The art journal gives students a place to plan, to gather resource and research materials, to do preliminary drawings and to experiment with media; in short, to explore and document their personal creative processes. On a very basic level, it helps students keep all required and exploratory material together.

Students might be expected to include in their journals all art-related written material and data relevant to particular units. For example, a given journal might include:

- teacher handouts
- definitions
- written research
- opinions
- quotations
- poetry
- brainstorming and webbing activities
-relevant creative writing
- any other significant written material

The journal should also reflect the development of visual ideas for the units being studied. A student might include such things as preliminary drawings, research sketches and photographic material, media experiments and exercises, independent drawings, or anything else of visual interest to the student.

For students who complete major projects before their classmates, the idea journal can also be a place for the development of additional solutions or extensions to the problems or for extra independent work.

The idea journal provides a very valuable record of each student's learning process.

Whenever possible, students should see and read examples of the sketchbooks, journals and letters of other artists (e.g. Leonardo da Vinci, Robert Bateman, Vincent van Gogh, Emily Carr, Paul Klee, Alex Colville). They should also be encouraged to share their personal creative struggles, as documented in the journals, with their peers; that way, they will become aware that there are many different and unique routes to solving a given artistic problem.

An idea journal is an excellent way to integrate Art and Language Arts!

Page from an idea journal on dragons by Joval G., grade 6.

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