One of the things we did differently this year was talking about filling buckets. I began the year by visiting every classroom the first week of school and reading, How Full Is Your Bucket? for Kids by Tom Rath and Mary Reckmeyer. The book is about how everyone has an invisible bucket. When our buckets are full, we feel great. When our buckets are empty, we feel pretty awful. We fill buckets through kind words and actions and empty buckets through negative actions. This sparked great conversations with the students regarding how to fill one another's buckets, and I LOVED getting a chance to go into classrooms and talk to kids right off the bat.
In the front hallway we created a display about bucket filling. I told the students that the teachers and I would be looking and listening for bucket fillers. When we saw bucket filling, students were given a water droplet to fill out describing their bucket filling action. The water droplets were then added to our display in the hallway. The kids and I talked about how awesome it would be to see a wall full of water droplets at the end of the year. We discussed how a school full of bucket fillers would be a pretty amazing place to attend.
All year long, the teachers, aides and I watched and listened for bucket fillers and recognized them accordingly. It was pretty cool. As the year went on I saw more students doing little things like holding the door for one another, helping someone who dropped their books and helping one another in the cafeteria. Those little things added up and made our school a better place. In turn, if someone made a poor choice, I used the bucket analogy to help the student understand how his or her actions emptied someone else's bucket.
Looking back, I know there were times when I got a little lax and forgot to watch for and celebrate bucket filling, but in all I think it was a pretty good year. I know my bucket was overflowing and that was because of all our awesome students and staff.
.JPG)
