To improve the dispersion of metals and to enhance the catalytic performance of SAPO-34 molecular sieves, the template-assisted method was applied to synthesize Co, Ni and Zn modified SAPO-34 molecular sieves by using palygorskite as silicon source and tetraethylammonium hydroxide as template. The metal modified SAPO-34 molecular sieves were characterized by XRD, SEM, XPS, N2-adsorption-desorption, NH3-TPD, FTIR, ICP-AES and TG. The N atoms of tetraethylammonium hydroxide exhibited the different forces to three metal ions, thus the acidity of the molecular sieves was further regulated. Compared with metal modified SAPO-34 molecular sieves prepared by impregnation, metal modified SAPO-34 molecular sieves prepared by template-assisted maintained higher surface area, bigger pore volume and better dispersion of metals. The catalytic performance of metal modified SAPO-34 molecular sieves prepared by template-assisted method in the reaction of methanol-to-olefins (MTO) was investigated in the fixed bed reactor. Under the reaction conditions that the reaction temperature was 400 °C, the reaction pressure was 0.1 MPa, the feed WHSV was 2.0 h-1 and the mass of catalyst was 0.5 g, Ni modified SAPO-34 molecular sieves exhibited great methanol conversion and high selectivity to light olefins. The selectivity of light olefins reached 95.7%.