Are You A Bucket Filler? We Are!!

This was an amazing week! We are really starting to come together as a class. The students are settling into our routines much better and we were able to spend some quality time this week learning about how to make our classroom a fun, safe, and happy place to be.

This is something that I normally wait til a little later in the year to do, once the children know each other better. But my son, Max, inspired me to get started this week.  Tuesday night he actually told me something about his day at school! Amazing, right?!? He said, "Mom, you know that book you have about the bucket? (I did actually know what he was talking about, too!) My teacher read that to us today." I'm thinking ok, great, but what a random thing to tell me. So I said, "Yeah? So what made you decide to tell me about it?" His response was, " Remember when I asked you for a hug after dinner and then told you I loved you? Well I was being a bucket filler." Now you might not know what a bucket filler is, but this brought tears to my eyes. I thought to myself there is no better time to work on making our classroom a fun, safe, and happy place than right now.

The premise of the book is that we all carry around an invisible "bucket" with our good feelings in it. People can either be bucket fillers by saying and doing nice things, or bucket dippers by being mean and say unkind things. And this book is a great way to help the children understand how to think about others and not just themselves.

So I scraped my lesson plans for Wednesday and we spent our day building our classroom community. It's not going to be a one day thing, but we are off to a good start. We read the Have You Filled A Bucket Book?, talked about ways we can be bucket fillers (and bucket dippers), watched a story about Chrysanthemum and identified bucket fillers and bucket dippers in the story, learned about the importance of teamwork in our classroom so we cab all succeed and the desk teams spent some time coming up with "team names".  We will be continuing to focus on ways to  be bucket fillers each and every day so that eventually it will become a habit.

I'm so proud of the kids and all their efforts. You can support out bucket filling focus at home as well. Tell your child when they do something that "fills" your bucket...maybe they cleaned up their toys without being asked, or acted really nicely toward a sibling. When you let them know they "filled your bucket", it will fill your bucket too!

Enjoy the beautiful weekend. As I write this I am sitting at Buffalo High School watching my son play flag football. I hope you are able to spend some time with your child this weekend in the outdoors. I know we will be soaking up as much of this weather as we can before it's gone!