Bucket Filling/Classroom Community

I hope you are all having a great first few weeks getting back to school! If you are anything like me, you are ALL about building the community from day one and making it stronger each day. We are at a point where we have had many great talks about kindness, classroom community, and bucket-filling. Now, it is time to keep it going throughout the year. It helps me to have systems that the students can use so that our ideas about bucket-filling are more than a poster on the wall. I reflect on: How can this be the language we use daily? How can I have the students fueling the positivity and growth in the classroom?

I created this bulletin board as a new feature in my classroom this year.

After we learn about bucket filling from reading How Full is Your Bucket? and Have You Filled a Bucket Today? we create a poster of how we can be bucket-fillers in the classroom. Students model bucket-filling choices, and I take pictures to put on the poster. Then, the students work with groups to create bucket-filling skits. We do many Stand Up- Hand Up- Pair Ups throughout the the day for students to share what they are doing as bucket-fillers or what they have seen someone else do. It makes for a great movement break too!

Then, after all that, this is where this bulletin board comes in. We have a class meeting and establish 4 categories for buckets. (For example: friendship, sharing, helping, etc). We will label the buckets.  The students have access to little notes where they write the child's name who filled their bucket and how they filled his/her bucket. We pull them out and share them throughout the week. Then, the bucket-filler takes the note home to share with his/her parents. This was MUCH easier for me than having each child have his or her personal bucket-- That was a little too much to keep track of and too much going on that we couldn't recognize it as a whole group enough.

The next piece you see in the middle is "The Bucket-Filler of the Week." I do check-off when each student has a turn because we can catch everyone filling a bucket at some point! :) I put that child's picture up for the week and we honor that child by noticing all the bucket-filling he/she does throughout the week! It's a great praise and motivation tool. You can find it for FREE in my store here:
Bucket Filler of the Week


Some other books that I read that help continue our bucket-filling conversations:

Each Kindness
Sandwich Swap
What if Everybody did that?
Mean Jean the Recess Queen
Rainbow Fish
Snail Started It