Last year my class was pretty amazing. In all of my 11 years of teaching I had never had a class like last years class. My students were phenomenal. I set my expectations and my students did everything they were supposed to, for the most part. Even thought they were amazing students, they still had issues with each other at times. They would pick at each other and every once an a while someone was mean to someone else. So I thought to myself, what could I do with them to change some things?
One of the things I am so glad I did mid-year last year was read the book How Full is your Bucket: For Kids by Tom Rath and Mary Reckmeyer with my students. Here it it:
My students loved this book! It really resonated with them. We had some great discussions in class about behaviors, how to treat people, and what it means to be a bucket filler. We talked about how positive words can really help someone's day and how positivity helped in the story. After our discussion, I gave all of my students slips of paper with each student's name on it except for theirs. Even my name was in their pile and I had my pile of all of their names. They were to write a positive action that person did or a positive emotion that person made you feel. For example, many students wrote to one student that they thought he was funny and he always made them smile. We sat and worked on these for a good 5-10 minutes. Afterwards we sat back at our carpet and passed around brown paper bags that had each student's name on them, placing our slips into each student's bag. Afterwards I let the students read their slips to see what positive things their peers and I had noticed about them. The students were all smiles by the end of the lesson. Something that took only 30 minutes or so really touched my students' hearts.
After we did this activity I kept their bags and lined them up on a shelf in my room. If they needed a word of encouragement or wanted to add to someone's bag they were allowed to go to the bags and do what they needed to. I tried to have them add in words of encouragement every once and a while as a whole class after this activity as well. At the end of the year, I let my students take their bags home to see how they impacted others. It was really a great way for students to give each other encouragement and a shout out for doing something awesome. This next year, instead of doing bags like this year I'm going to do a bulletin on my front room cabinet where they can put shout outs to each other. This way we can be bucket fillers all year long and not just for a short period of time.
We also did this activity as a staff to show how we as a staff thought of ourselves (this was done in bubbles on the wall to show that Mrs. Wulf is caring, inspiring, and passionate, etc.) and what we thought about the great things we saw other teachers doing in the building (our bucket filler/shout out cards on the wall). Are you a bucket filler? Have you used this book in your classroom before? How have you used it? Do you have a shout out board? Let me know! I always love to see and hear about what other educators are doing in their classrooms!
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