1st Grade Bucket-Filling Lesson

We started a new round of lessons today and they are about.... buckets! Buckets? Yes, buckets.

In all grades, we will read the book Have You Filled A Bucket Today? by Carol McCloud. The basic idea is that everyone in the world has an invisible bucket, and our buckets hold our good thoughts and good feelings about ourselves.

When we talk about "filling people's buckets," we mean saying and doing considerate things to help others feel special, important, and loved. "Bucket-dipping" is the opposite: saying and doing unkind things that make others feel un-special or unimportant. This year I am also introducing the concept of "putting a lid on your bucket," which means protecting your feelings if someone is being unkind. Instead of letting their meanness hurt you, you can walk away, ignore them, ask them to stop, find other people to play with, or tell yourself that what they are saying isn't true or isn't worth worrying about.

The lessons will encourage students to think of ways that they can be bucket-fillers for classmates, parents, siblings, teachers, and other people in their lives. The bucket-filling concept is a great tool for friendship and social skills development, and it also ties in with our state's character education initiatives, particularly the traits we happen to celebrate in November: kindness, compassion, and caring.

For this 1st grade lesson, we will read the book, then do a sorting activity in teams to identify bucket-filling and bucket-dipping words and actions. If we have time (we usually save a lot of time for fun stuff when we are good listeners!), we'll shoot a ball into a box like a basketball hoop for naming our own bucket-filling ideas. I've also been trying to save time for a toothpaste demonstration. The basic idea of that is once we say or do something, we cannot take it back or make everything just like it was before. That is like trying to put toothpaste back into the tube! You cannot ever get it back in like nothing ever happened. Apologies are the same way; it is nice to say we are sorry, but it is better to think before we act because we cannot always take away the hurt we've caused people or repair our reputations.

I'll see Dockery, Thomas, L. Foster, Childers, Ray, Durett, Brown, and Turner this week. All other 1st grade classes will take place next week.

From January 14-18, the whole school will celebrate Bucket-Filling Week. I will send home a page of two buckets with each student, and they will be asked to make a special effort to say and do caring things for the week. Students and family members can document their kind deeds on the paper buckets, then bring them back to school. We will hang them in the hallways so everyone can take note of our caring acts!