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At the start of every new school year, conversations often turn to one thing: goal-setting. Vision boards are a powerful tool to help students visualize their academic and personal goals. The visuals on the board are meant to serve as a reminder of what the future can look and feel like if your students take the necessary steps to achieve their goals. Explore unique vision board ideas for students to help you individualize this activity to each of them.
How to Make a Vision Board at School
While a children’s vision board and a vision board for teens will look different, students of all ages can create vision boards that include personal goals, home-life goals, behavior goals, academic goals, or a combination of these! Be sure to explain clearly what the purpose of a vision board is. Showing some examples will be helpful for younger students.
In general, you can follow these simple steps to help your class create vision boards:
- Make a List of Goals: Before students begin creating their vision boards, they need to define their goals and areas of growth. Teach students to use the SMART formula to ensure that any goals they set are specific and measurable.
- Create a Word Wall: Have students write down words and quotes that feel relevant to the goals they listed. This can be a simple brainstorming activity, or students can do some research to find quotes from books, movies, songs, or famous people.
- Select Images: Provide students with old books and magazines they can cut images from, let them print out images, or have them save images on their computers for a digital vision board. These images should represent their goals and illustrate how they’ll feel when they’ve achieved them.
Vision Board Project & Rubric – Back-to-School, New Year, End-of-Year Activities
By Jenn Liu — Engaging to Empower
Grades: 9th-12th
Subjects: Life Skills
Teach middle and high school students how to make a vision board using this no-prep, interactive Google Slides lesson! These comprehensive slides cover everything — what a vision board is, the purpose of a vision board, and how vision boards work.
7 Unique Vision Board Ideas for Students
Each student’s vision board will be as unique as they are. Encourage your class to use original themes and formats to help their vision boards feel really personal.
1. Guide students through goal-setting with a vision board workbook
For younger students or those struggling to think of goals, a workbook-style approach allows you to prompt them each step of the way. You can compile a series of worksheets into your own workbook or use a ready-made vision board workbook. Once all the pages are complete, students can use the information to create a vision board.
Vision Board Student Workbook
By Danielle Knight
Grades: 4th-12th
Subjects: English Language Arts
Students will create a 15×20 vision board using this eight-section guide. The activity is designed for students to communicate and work together, so your students will enjoy discussions and movement while working on their vision board templates.
2. Start the new year with new goals
New Year’s resolutions transform into goals for the new year when you tie this holiday and activity together. Coming back from winter break can be challenging, but starting with elementary goal-setting activities can help get everyone back into learning mode.
New Year Resolution 2025 Goals Setting Activity, Vision Board 2025 Kindergarten
By Simply Kinder
Grades: PreK-3rd
Start the new year with a meaningful activity that empowers your students to envision their best selves! This New Year’s resolution and vision board activity lets kindergarteners explore personal goals and aspirations with words, symbols, and pictures..
New Year Vision Boards Goal-Setting
By Catch the Buzz
Grades: 5th-11th
This comprehensive resource is designed to guide educators through a 3-to-6-day lesson plan that encourages students to craft inspiring vision boards using images and words from magazines.
3. Ease back from breaks with vision board planning
Settling back into school routines after seasonal and holiday breaks is hard for students and teachers alike. A personal and creative activity, like vision board planning, can feel a bit less stressful than diving right into topical lesson plans.
2025 Vision Board Lesson Templates for Middle School – Day After Winter Break
By The Sassy Math Teacher
Grades: 6th-8th
Kick off the new year with this ready-to-use, digital and printable vision board template for middle schoolers. It’s the perfect way to ease your students back into learning after winter break.
4. Go digital with portable vision boards
Keeping their vision board on hand will help students remember and reflect on their goals. Students can also add to their vision boards whenever inspiration strikes! Use digital vision boards as a fun way to incorporate classroom activities with AI by letting students use AI tools to create phrases and images that match their goals.
Digital Vision Board Template for Students
By Jan’s File Cabinet
Grades: 6th-8th
Subjects: English Language Arts
Engage middle grades students as they create vision boards reflecting their dreams, goals, and priorities, and learn about a motivational technique that can help them be successful in life. Students can save the boards to their computers and update them throughout the year.
5. Start each semester with a new vision board
Growth and development happen quickly at all grade levels in school, and so do goals and future plans! Help students see the value in revising or rewriting their vision boards on a regular basis, so they reflect the now.
Semester Vision Board
By The Accidental Librarian
Grades: 6th-12th
Guide students in creating vision boards to help clarify their goals and center their thinking. This is a great activity for either the beginning or end of the semester, and it works well for building students’ social-emotional skills.
6. Turn vision boards into a bulletin board display
Take your bulletin board beyond seasonal themes and art projects this year. Make your display meaningful and useful by hanging up your students’ vision boards. They’ll serve as inspiration for students to keep their goals top of mind, and they might even inspire others! You could also create one large class vision board on your bulletin board.
Vision Board Project Goal Setting Bulletin Board Activity
By Kitten Approved Curriculum
Grades: 3rd-6th
Students use a vision board planning sheet, graphic organizers, a checklist, and inspirational images to craft vision boards. The vision boards are accompanied by a writing assignment, and then they’re all hung as a class display.
7. Take the vision even further into the future
As students begin to enter a time when they get to choose some of their classes, career exploration activities are important. To help them brainstorm, have your class create vision boards related to their future career goals.
Vision Board & Career Exploration Project | Digital + No Prep
By Inside the Gifted Classroom
Grades: 3rd-6th
This digital project, in Google Slides and PowerPoint formats, gets your students thinking about their future by creating a vision board. They’ll do some career exploration, researching the required education and summing it all up into one word or phrase that describes their future.
Benefits of Creating Vision Boards for Students
Vision boards are personally meaningful, and they look great! But they also help students develop a variety of skills that will enable them to lead successful lives.
- According to Psychology Today, vision boards help people gain self-awareness and imagine a positive future, which promotes optimism and increases success rates.
- Experts at The Genius of Play report that, for children, specifically, vision boards improve focus, concentration, storytelling, artistic expression, and new ways of thinking.
- The Learning Disabilities Association of Wisconsin shares that vision boards help students with learning disabilities think critically and enhance their motivation, which boosts their self-confidence.
- Recent research also indicates that vision boards help underrepresented youth nurture their self-identities and develop self-efficacy.
Turn visions into realities with TPT
The seemingly simple act of setting goals can help students reach their fullest potential at school, at home, and even out in the wider world. Use vision board resources created by teachers to help your students see their successful futures!
