Canva yearbook templates for elementary schools
These are eleven complete elementary yearbook designs, each built in Canva, from soft watercolor to comic book and outer space. Browse them here to decide what feels like your school; a Rethink school picks one, and its first draft and every page after that are built from it in Canva.
Canva makes it easy to copy and paste between designs, so you aren’t locked into one. Mix a cover from one template with page styles from another, or bring in anything from Canva’s own element library.
The eleven designs.
| Design | Theme | Feel |
|---|---|---|
| Watercolor Whispers | Watercolor bubbles: soft paint washes, gradients | Calm, artsy · pastel |
| Unfolding Memories | Origami scrapbook: paper cranes, cut-paper letters, washi tape | Nostalgic, artsy · pastel |
| Comic Book | Superheroes, action lines, speech bubbles | Energetic, bold · saturated |
| Colorful Journeys | Safari and travel: watercolor lions and elephants, road trip | Cute, playful · pastel |
| Vibrant Strokes | Confetti and ribbons: squiggles, brush strokes, bold numbers | Playful, energetic · bright |
| Splashtastic | Sky and hills: clouds, rolling hills, watercolor landscape | Calm, cute · pastel |
| Blasting Off into New Adventures | Space: astronauts, rockets, planets | Playful, energetic · saturated |
| Fun in the Sun | Honeycomb photo grid: hexagon collages, summer | Playful, energetic · saturated |
| STEM | Science and discovery | Playful, calm · light |
| Schoolyard Adventures | Notebook paper: lined paper, school doodles, student art | Nostalgic, playful · light |
| Caps & Milestones | School spirit: mascot, music, graduation, photo banners | Nostalgic, grown-up · dark, rich |
Full sample books for each design are in the Rethink coordinator dashboard. Open sample templates for any school to copy into Canva are on the way.
Download link coming soon
How do I choose a yearbook template?
- Start from your school, not the trend. A school with a strong mascot or colors suits a school-spirit design. A school that wants the children’s own art front and center suits a notebook or scrapbook style.
- Think about the youngest and oldest readers. A kindergartner and a graduating 5th grader both get this book. Cute works for one; the other may prefer something less babyish.
- Check how much room it leaves for photos. Heavily decorated designs look wonderful with a few photos per page. Photo-grid designs such as honeycomb carry more.
- Pick the cover last. If you’re running a cover art contest, the winning artwork may decide the palette for you.
How are the templates used?
At a Rethink school, the template is one of two things our free First Draft is built from. The other is your ladder, the page-by-page plan. Choose a template, and your first draft comes back in that design, in Canva, for your team to edit. What First Draft is and isn’t →
- Choose in spring. Picking a template is a March job, when your ladder is settled.
- Want something different? Coordinators can request a template from the dashboard. Do it in the fall, so there’s time to make it.
- Keep the look consistent with our Canva layouts, embellishments and special pages, made to drop into any of these designs.
The templates, the page libraries and First Draft are all $0 for a Rethink school, as is setup.
Why Canva?
Most volunteers already know it, it runs in a browser, and a whole committee can work on the book at the same time. There’s no proprietary editor to learn, and you can bring in any freelance Canva designer if you want help. Canva for yearbook volunteers →
Choose a template.
Get a first draft back.
Every child is in the shared school pages of a Rethink yearbook, and families who choose personalization get pages built around their own child’s class and grade.