Classroom printables, activities & worksheets

Gratitude Teaching Resources

Teaching gratitude in the classroom? Our teacher team has cooked up gratitude worksheets, activities, and more to make this part of social and emotional learning click with your students. The practice of gratitude is an important part of building resilience, increasing mindfulness and helping to develop a growth mindset. These teaching resources can be used to support daily gratitude practice, or for stand-alone activities.

What Is Gratitude for Kids?

There are countless definitions of gratitude out there from simple thankfulness to the positive feeling you get when someone does something nice for you to the more active concept of purposely noting what’s good in our lives. When it comes to kids and gratitude, there’s research that shows kids who are mindful of the concept of gratitude have better life satisfaction overall when compared to their peers. Researchers have likewise found that adolescents who are grateful are happier and more optimistic and give more emotional support to others. In other words? Teaching kids gratitude can affect a lot more than just the classroom environment.

Modeling Gratitude

One of the most important parts of teaching kids about gratitude is modeling it ourselves. By increasing our own awareness of how we present our feelings throughout the day, we can help our students learn to have a gratitude mindset as their default. That’s not to say that when the projector suddenly stops connecting with your laptop that you shouldn’t express some frustration (it’s equally important to model how to cope with challenging emotions, too). However, you can make a conscious effort to express gratitude through words, writing, and acts of reciprocity. These seemingly small things don’t go unnoticed by the little sponges in your classroom!