Google Jamboard Templates

Jamboard Templates for Teachers that Make Social Emotional Learning Fun + Easy To Fit Into Your Day

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10 Ways to Use Jamboard to Teach Social Emotional Skills

If you’ve been around here for a bit, you know that I love using Google Slides and Google Jamboard for collaborative activities with students. These programs were actually designed for collaboration! And guess what kids love? They love working together with their classmates, especially online.

Jamboards are ideal for morning meetings, mini lessons for writer’s workshop and reader’s workshop, and even as math manipulatives.

Google Jamboard is also perfect for fitting Social Emotional Learning (SEL) into your busy school day. Using Jamboard is a quick way to get students to reflect and learn about themselves, support each other, and build your classroom community, while focusing on SEL at the same time.

More and more teachers are realizing the importance of teaching SEL and the impact it can have on their students and behavior management in the classroom.

This set of Jamboards has been the highest requested set yet.

What are the 5 social emotional learning skills?

You can use these Jamboard templates to cover so many of the topics that fall under skills like recognizing emotions, empathy, daily check-ins, working towards a goal, growth mindset, self-love and confidence, dealing with conflict, choosing how to act in certain situations, daily reflections, taking ownership of your thoughts and actions, and more.

How do you use Google Jamboard for Social Emotional Learning?

Social Emotional Learning is so important that honestly you could treat it as an essential subject that you teach every day.

If you’re like most teachers, you know how important SEL is, but barely have enough time to fit in the core subjects into each day.

The nice thing about using Jamboard templates for SEL is that you don’t need an entire class period to make an impact.

A Jamboard template can be used when you only have 5-15 minutes to spare and it will still make a big impact with students.

Here are some of the ways you can use SEL Jamboards in your classroom:

10 Social Emotional Activities for Jamboard

1. Self-Love and Confidence Jamboards

Here’s an example of a really easy Affirmation Station Jamboard that you can use with students. I place sticky notes on the Jamboard ahead of time, so all students have to do is click on one and type an affirmation. They can even insert emojis too!

You can also pose discussion questions for students to respond to. Discussion questions are a great way for students to show some love for themselves and realize we all have parts of us we might want to change.

Asking questions like, When are you your best self? What do you admire about yourself? What’s the best part of you? What kind of person do you want to be today? What personality traits do you love and not love about yourself? are ways for your students to feel some extra love, think about their strengths, and set goals for themselves.

You can also have students write themselves a Thank You Note on a sticky, acknowledging something their brain or body has allowed them to do.

2. Identifying Feelings Jamboards

As teachers, we spend a lot of time asking students about things they love and enjoy, but not nearly as much time asking students about things that bug them or things they find frustrating.

It’s important for students to identify their emotions and realize how they’re linked to their thoughts and actions so they can understand how to respond to them appropriately. (This will also help with classroom management and behavior.)

Starting these conversations at the beginning of the year (or as soon as you can) sets the tone that your classroom is a safe space for students to share.

You can use these Jamboards to cover a lot of feelings like being nervous, sad, annoyed, and angry. With the blank template, you can also type in any emotion you think your students are feeling and have them talk about it.

3. Daily Check-In Jamboards

Morning Meeting is one of my favorite ways to start the day and some of the most valuable time to get to know your students and check in with them and how they’re feeling when they arrive at school.

When students come into class, I have a Jamboard projected on the board that asks them to show how they’re feeling.

Students can show their mood by putting a sticky underneath an image or text that describes how they’re feeling. I like changing the images frequently.

Other ways students can show their mood is to copy and paste an emoji onto a sticky note or even take their selfie showing the emotion on their face. Students LOVE this one. (I put sticky notes with the directions of how to do this right on the Jamboard if you use our templates.)

You can also have your students share the name of a song that represents how they’re feeling or have them identify with a certain color and tell why that color fits their mood.

We tend to do check-ins at the beginning of the day, but they’re also valuable to do throughout the day and especially before students go home. If you know a student isn’t in a great mood at the end of the day, you have the opportunity to intervene and potentially help solve their problem or worry before they take it home with them.

4. Weekly Themes and End of the Day Reflection Jamboards

You can also use Jamboard for daily themes each week.

Market Yourself Monday is a fun way for students to talk about their strengths and learn who might be valuable in helping them in a certain area. It’s easy to change the directions so you can use this Jamboard multiple times in different ways.

Try Teach Me Tuesday where students share something interesting they’ve learned recently, Thoughtful Thursday where they recognize one of their classmates, and Friday Funnies where students tell a joke or something funny that happened to them that week.

We usually think of using discussion Jamboards at the beginning of the day, but the end of the day is a powerful time to come together and reflect on the day.

The end of the day can also be very chaotic with packing up, so I love taking the last 10-15 minutes for a Jamboard. There’s nothing better than calming everyone (including you!) before the bell rings.

One idea is playing High, Low, Buffalo. It’s a fun way for students to talk about a high from their day, the low part of their day, and something unexpected that happened (buffalo).

Another end of the day Jamboard is Rose, Thorn, Bud. Rose is something positive that happened, thorn is something students need help with, and bud is something they’re looking forward to.

You can also have students reflect on something new they tried that day, a challenge they overcame, or their Wednesday Wins.

5. Relationships, Problem Solving, and Support Systems Jamboards

Jamboards are even great for helping students think about how they react to problems, how to solve problems, and gives them a chance to put themselves in someone else’s shoes.

Two of my favorite Jamboards work together to help solve a student’s problem as a class. On one Jamboard, students state a problem or worry they’re having. Throughout the week, I display one of those problems on another Jamboard. Then as a class, students use a sticky to offer suggestions of how to solve the problem.

You can use Jamboard to create scenarios for students to respond to. For example, use one of the templates to pose a question like What would you do if you saw someone cheating on their math assessment? or How would you feel if you were sitting at recess with some friends and everyone was invited to play 4-square except you?

If you asked one of these questions verbally to students just sitting on the carpet, you might have only a few students participate or if you have a class that loves to talk, you might not have time for everyone to share.

Jamboard gives everyone a voice and without the anxiety of having to talk in front of the class.

Support Systems

It’s important for students to identify who they can go to when they need help with a problem. You can use our Support System Jamboard to ask students questions like Who supports you at home? Who makes you laugh when you’re sad? Who’s a good listener?

I created a Help Wanted Job Board, where students can ask each other for help, and also one called Offer Your Help, where students post a sticky about a skill or concept they understand really well in the classroom, so others know who to come to for help.

6. Gratitude, Happiness, Kindness, and Empathy Jamboards

Do you personally practice gratitude each day? I try to. Imagine if we could get all of our students in the habit of practicing gratitude early on? ❤️

Asking students where their happy place is helps them think about places they’re grateful for. I think it’s important to recognize the places that make us happy so we know where we can go when we need a little positivity and peace.

Character Education Jamboards

I love using Jamboards to talk about character traits too. (SPOILER, character education Jamboards are coming out soon and will be added to my Jamboard Bundle. Grab the bundle now so you can get these for free when they’re added.)

To focus on character traits, you can ask simple question on a Jamboard like How can you show empathy this week? or When’s a time when you showed integrity?

I also like having my students create a how-to guide for kindness, where they collectively think of 25 ways to be kind to others.

7. Growth Mindset Jamboards

Growth mindset is one of my favorite things to teach students. (I also love using these growth mindset posters and Google Classroom headers as positive reminders in my classroom.)

Guiding students to have a growth mindset early on is so important in growing their self-confidence and shaping their learning process. When they understand that challenges and mistakes are part of learning, they’re more likely to take risks, participate, and grow emotionally and academically.

Here are some easy questions that you can ask your students to help with growth mindset: What’s something new you learned today? What mistake did you make today and what did you learn from it? What challenge did you have this week? How did you overcome it? What did you do today that made you try hard? Click here to see more growth mindset questions.

8. Habits and Goals Jamboards

Alright, I’m definitely guilty of this and I’m guessing many of you are too.

How many times do we have students write the goals they have at the beginning of the year and then… that’s it.

We don’t ask about them again, we don’t give them ideas how to achieve them, we just end the activity and never discuss them again.

How silly is this?

We should be asking students what goals or habits they want to create and HOW they’re going to achieve them.

Without helping students figure out how they’re going to achieve their habit or goal, it’s likely not going to happen.

For example, if a student says they want to become a better reader, we should be asking them how they’re going to accomplish this. What steps are they going to take? What habits do they need? And then check-in with them to keep them accountable.

In general I usually assign Jamboards to my entire class to work on at once, but Jamboards are also great to assign students individually. These goals Jamboards would be perfect to assign separately to each student.

9. Calming Down Jamboards

Calming Down Jamboards are really great to use throughout the day, specifically when students come back in from recess, after you transition from one activity to the next, after a noisy work session, or at the end of the day when packing up can be chaotic.

These Jamboards serve as a great reminder to students of how they can take a break in the classroom and how they can calm their nervous system.

Ask your students questions like, When do you feel the most calm? Where do you go to feel calm? What can you do when you need a break? What do you do to relax?

I have personally spent a lot of time practicing breathing and experiencing the role it plays in calming my mind and body.

Inhale Positives, Exhale Negatives can be used as both a breathing exercise and also a sticky note response activity.

Another Jamboard that’s great to use frequently is a Stop and Breath Jamboard. You can use it as a full-group activity where your class takes big belly breaths together, or you can give directions like Take 5 deep breaths, counting all the way to 5 as you slowly inhale. Then exhale everything out. Put your name on a sticky when you’re finished.

10. Inspiring and Celebrating Each Other (Student Shoutout Jamboards)

I loooove Jamboards that build up classmates! What’s better than seeing your students light up as they get a bunch of compliments?

If you use my Morning Meeting Jamboard set or Writer’s Workshop templates, you’ve seen other celebration Jamboards.

Student celebration Jamboards can be used as a bell ringer or any time of day.

I like to choose a student that I notice is having a hard day and put their name and picture on the Fill their Cup Jamboard. When students come back from recess or lunch, they start filling the Jamboard with compliments. Instantly that student gets 20+ positive messages from their classmates and it usually turns their day around!

The same can be done with our Class Shout-Outs Jamboard, Celebrate a Success Jamboard, or even the Thank You Note Jamboard that I talked about in #1 under Self-Love. See all the Compliment Jamboards here.

So what do you think? Are you ready to start using Jamboard to help with Social Emotional Learning in your classroom?

If you want to save your prep time creating SEL Jamboards, you can grab the set I’ve already made. There’s 116 different Jamboard templates that you can use for Social Emotional Learning all year long. Click here to start using them today.

Want even more ideas? Click here to see 100+ more ways to use Jamboard for SEL!