Have You Filled a Bucket Today?

This month at our Elementary School we are studying the Character Counts pillar of caring. In my third grade classroom, we are studying the pillar by focusing on the book Have You Filled a Bucket Today?: A Guide to Daily Happiness for Kids by Carol McCloud. The book is great because it talks about acts of caring and feelings in a language that kids of all ages can understand. The imagery of "filling" someone's "bucket" with acts of kindness is a powerful piece of imagery as well!

The lesson I am using for the book came to me off of an email I received from the mailing list from Bucket Fillers Inc. If you use this book in your guidance program I would suggest that you join, they have some great ideas!! After we read the book together, we talked about ways that students can fill buckets at school, especially their teachers buckets! The students made a list of good behavior choices that would fill their teacher's buckets, and drew pictures inside individual buckets of things they can do in the classroom to fill their teacher's buckets.


I also brought a bucket full of "snowballs" and did a demonstration of what happens to a teacher's bucket when too many students "scoop". The students listed bad behaviors that scoop from a teacher's bucket as I scooped the snowballs out of the bucket, and then listed good behaviors as we filled the bucket back up. This lesson was a great way to tie our Character Counts pillar of the month, Caring, into a lesson in the ASCA academic domain - good classroom behavior!