Day 1: Being Bucket Fillers

A few years ago, I found out about the concept of Bucket Filling and fell in love. It was the perfect way to highlight how being kind or cruel has its effects. The concreteness of the idea really hit home with the kids and I'm excited to say that now our entire school reads Have You Filled a Bucket the first month we go back. Yay!

If you have not read this book, you MUST! It is incredible :)

The basic premise is this: we all walk around with buckets. When someone is nice, it fills our bucket. When someone is mean, it drains our bucket.

People who are nice and do nice things are Bucket Fillers. Those who dip out of other people's buckets are Bucket Dippers. Bucket Dippers think dipping from other people's buckets will fill their bucket, but really, their bucket is emptier than ever. {love that part!}

The book goes on to explain ways you can be bucket fillers and it leads very well into creating your own list as a class about how you can be bucket fillers in the classroom and at school. I found a FANTASTIC resource on Pinterest and have blown it up to poster size to hang in my classroom because the ideas were all spot-on!There are a host of other fantastic anchor charts on my Bucketfilling/Character Ed board on Pinterest if you'd like to see more.

Today, we also made a version of Cara Carroll's Peacemakers/Peacebreakers chart, but I changed the headers to read "Bucket Fillers" and "Bucket Dippers":

Each child had a cut out on their seat, so they had to read it aloud and say whether it was bucket filling or bucket dipping. Kids would gesture along by using a thumbs-up for bucket filling and a thumbs down for bucket dipping.

You can pick up a free copy of the headers HERE.

You can download the words and phrases from First Grade Fanatics by clicking HERE.

Now this chart is hanging prominently in our room so we can refer back to it throughout the year :)

There are so many ways to display bucket fillers bulletin boards, mini buckets, etc. in the room. I am so limited on wall space, so I have devised something simple and easy that still acknowledges my kiddos who fill buckets and builds our classroom community at the same time: Our Classroom Bucket!

I found this to be the easiest because it still is a bucket, but whew! it's so much easier than finding room for 27 buckets!

Here is my classroom setup with the poster (I made is poster-size so it's easy to read from anywhere!) and our class bucket and the bucket filling cards I ordered from Vistaprint.

Anytime throughout the week, kids can come back, grab a slip and fill it in, then drop it in the bucket.

Then, once a week, I will take the bucket during our class meeting and choose as many as I can to read aloud and share with the class. We applaud the bucket filler and the recipient can keep the card to take home and show their parents.

If we run out of slips, I will open it up to the students for a verbal bucket filler slip: "So and so filled my bucket when ____"

All of these ways help to acknowledge the kids that are doing great things and going above and beyond. I will often see them referring to our anchor chart and the cool poster from Pinterest when they are writing their slip, so I find it helpful to keep those near the bucket and/or meeting area.

Do you use Bucket Filling? I'd love to hear any additional ideas I can incorporate this year :)