Wednesday, July 29, 2015

Bucket Filling with Tech to Build Community

     One of the best things I did in my kindergarten classroom last year (along with thousands of other classrooms around the world) was to read How Full is Your Bucket? for Kids. I know the power of this activity because parents come to me asking to know more about Bucket Filling...their 5 year old comes home saying, "Mom, you dipped from my bucket!" If you haven't read this book, you NEED to! It teaches children the value of encouraging others in a way they internalize. The children love the book and can identify with Felix's struggles.
     After the read aloud, we build understanding and process Bucket Filling behavior with some of the activities in Ashley Reed's Bucket Filler Brigade Unit . After that, we sing The Bucket Filler Song by Michael B.  We created some gestures which help get us moving. This song is part of our morning routine, and we sing it daily.  It sets the tone for lifting others up throughout our school day.  Each day, we think-pair-share about bucket filling or bucket dipping behavior. We are sure to go deep and discuss why that example appropriate. I use sentence frames which look like this:   _____________ filled my bucket when he/she _______________.  This made me feel __________ because _______________. If we talk about Bucket DIPPING we work hard to leave out the name of the bucket dipper to protect anonymity.  We take the time to share out with the whole class daily, especially at the beginning of school, to help reinforce appropriate and inappropriate behavior.  Often, we use our tablets to video a child describing Bucket Filling Behavior to post to our classroom blog.  Our Student of the Day gets to choose a Bucket Filling Buddy to help take a tablet out during recess or choice time to find evidence of Bucket Filling. We can then create a classroom Bucket Filling video using WeVideo (a free and easy video editor) to post to our blog or print out pics for a bulletin board. My students leave my classroom understanding the value of encouraging others, and yours can too!  What do you do to teach and reinforce encouraging behavior in your classroom?

Here are last year's Bucket Filling Cuties.  You can see some of the gestures we used with The Bucket Filler Song by Michael B which you can find on YouTube.

1 comment:

  1. Very helpful and motivating! Thanks for working so hard at sharing this!

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