Family Vision Boards

With the new year upon us, families are looking for creative ways to set goals and make them stick. Whether you have a couple of toddlers or teenagers, a family vision board is something that works for family members of all ages. Get together and create one as an entire family and let each family member create their own. Here’s how to create one!

Start Creating With These Tips

Gather Plenty of Supplies

Depending on your family’s level of creativity, you might need a lot of supplies. Some things to include are:

• Poster boards, manila folders, or poster paper
• Crayons, markers, colored pencils, and paints
• Glue sticks, white school glue, or clear tape
• Photographs of family members, favorite locations, and other important things
• Magazines, newspapers, and printed advertisements
• Old, damaged books that you’d otherwise throw away
• Stickers, ribbons, craft paper, and other decorative crafts

Get Rid of Distractions and Start Brainstorming

It’s often easier to brainstorm ideas for your family vision boards if you don’t have other distractions. Put the phones away, turn off the TV, turn off the radio and just give your family time to think. Quiet study music might be helpful to get the creative juices flowing. One person can be the scribe, and everyone can just call out ideas that they want to include in the goal plan for the year. Anything goes, so “take a family trip to Mount Rushmore” can be written down, but so can “bake together every Sunday.”

You can also add words that you want to incorporate in everything you do throughout the year. “Mindful,” “joyful,” “intentional,” “minimal,” and other similar words might be included. Just think about how you want your family to act, what you want your family to accomplish, and what words will help you all get to that point.

Once you have all your ideas written down, categorize them, put them into a timeline or organize them in another way that works for your family. Some categories you might include for both family and individual boards are:

• New Skills
• Family Trips
• Dreams
• Getting Along
• Love and Relationships
• Community Service

If you’d like, you can assign a color, shape, or other distinguishing feature to each category. This might be helpful when you organize everything on the board.

Find Pictures for Each Item

This might take a while, but it’s something everyone will enjoy. Start going through the photographs, magazines, books, and other media you collected to find a picture that aligns with every single goal you have written down. If you can’t find a picture for one or two, that’s when you put someone’s art skills to work and make a visual. For example, if one of your goals is to visit Mount Rushmore, and you can’t find a good representation, have your child use gray colored paper and a black marker to draw the sight.

If you’re working on a family vision board, you might want to include photographs of specific family members next to individual goals. For example, if your family’s goal is to help little Johnny learn to tie his shoes, include a photo of Johnny holding his sneakers. If It’s a family goal to move Suzy into her college dorm together, include a photo of Suzy at the college campus. For goals that relate to everyone as a whole, you may not need individual photographs, but still including group photos is a great way to put some extra personalization on each goal.

Begin the Layout

Whether you’re using a poster board, manila folder, or poster paper, begin your layout. Group the magazine, books, and photograph clippings together for each goal and set them on the board. If you’re using a timeline approach, pencil in the dates for each goal so you can keep it organized. If you’re going with categories, you can split the board into sections. If you don’t want that much organization, you can just attach each goal where you feel they look good.

Once you’ve laid everything out on the board, have everyone take a step back and look at what you’ve accomplished so far. Is there anything someone feels the family has missed? Does someone want to rearrange any of the goals? Is there a word or photo that just doesn’t seem to fit the family’s overall goal? Discuss these things until everyone agrees the family vision board is the perfect representation of what you’re trying to accomplish as a family.

For individual boards, have each family member do the same thing. For smaller children, the parents might want to provide a little direction, but it’s also fun to see what activities and items are important to them.

Finalize the Project

If everything is looking good, it’s time to attach the items to the board. Glue sticks are probably the easiest way to do this, but you could also use white school glue or clear tape. If your family members feel extra creative, you could add some fun stickers, ribbons, pom-poms, and other craft items to decorate and add some pizzazz. You could also include some doodles, sketches, and written words to make it extra full and complete.

Display the Family Vision Board

One of the reasons this is fun for families is because it can provide direction for the entire year of family activities. As long as it is in clear view at all times, everyone can encourage each other as the year goes on. You want to display it somewhere it will be seen every day. The kitchen is a room that gets frequented, so that might be a good location. The fridge, a large cupboard door, or an empty wall are some spaces you might look to.

You could also display your vision board in a family room, great room, or other areas where the family gets together regularly. Another idea is to take a picture of the board so everyone with a digital device can have a digital copy on hand. You could also print small copies for family members to keep in their bedrooms, purses, wallets, etc.

If you went the route of creating personal vision boards during this activity, each family member should display it in their private bedroom. Even if the bedroom is shared, each person can hang the personal board next to their bed, inside a closet, or in another personal area of the shared room.

Review the Goals Regularly

If you want to reach your goals, you have to review them. Encourage each family member to at least glance at the board each day, so it’s fresh in everyone’s minds. Once a week, look over the board as a group to take inventory of how you’re all doing. Once a month, consider what changes need to be made and what you can do to progress more quickly.

Something interesting about goals is they often change. Just because something was important to you at the beginning of the year, doesn’t mean it will remain important to your family throughout the remainder of the year. For example, if you planned to take the family to Europe on vacation, but someone was diagnosed with a muscle disorder and can’t get out much, you might alter that goal to have a staycation so everyone in the family can participate.

As you can see, it doesn’t have to be challenging to come up with some family goals and work toward achieving them. When your family activities are thought out ahead of time, they become more meaningful to everyone involved. Contact Casa de Corazón for more fun family activity ideas.