Gratitude towers are an excellent social-emotional learning STEM activity to incorporate into your classroom.

Gratitude is such an important skill to teach students. Studies show that when students practice expressing their feelings, they have higher levels of optimism, increased life satisfaction, and decreased negative feelings. Additionally, students who regularly express gratitude appreciate close relationships and feel better about their life and school.

Social Awareness

Gratitude is part of CASEL’s Social-Emotional Learning Framework. It falls under the Social Awareness competency. Social awareness is the ability to recognize the feelings of others. When taught social awareness skills, students learn to demonstrate compassion and empathy as well as understand end express gratitude.

Materials Needed

• Index Cards
• Tape
• Pens/pencils

The Steps

Using the Engineer Design Process, students can follow the steps below to build their towers.

1. Give your students a stack of index cards.
2. Have your students write one thing they are thankful for on each index card. If they need more index cards, give them more.
3. Have your students get into groups of two or three.
4. Have them brainstorm and sketch how they are going to build a tower with their index cards.
5. Using tape and index cards, allow students to build their tower. The more things they are thankful for, the taller their tower will be.
6. Allow students to reflect on what they would do differently next time, and then discuss some of the things they are thankful for.