We are elbow-deep into being “bucket-fillers” this week! I’m
going to focus this post on what exactly that means.
Here’s the theory (which originated in the book for adults How Full Is Your Bucket? by Tom Rath and
has been translated into many, many children books - we read this one): Everyone has an invisible bucket over their
head. When your bucket is full, you feel great. When your bucket is empty, you
feel bad. Feeling bad often causes us to treat each other badly. Our goal, with
this theory in mind, is to fill each others buckets. When we fill someone
else’s bucket, our bucket gets filled up too. We feel better by making other
people feel better.
I always, always, always try to emphasize the positive, (If
I’m asking the kids to be bucket-fillers, I better be a bucket-filler myself!)
so we focus on being bucket-fillers here. On a wall in our south classroom, we
have a line of buckets – each one has the name (and, soon, a picture) of a
student. Every time I, or someone else, sees a friend filling someone’s bucket,
I will say, “_________, you just filled her bucket!” This is the friend’s cue
to go put a pom-pom in his/her bucket.
As we start to fill up buckets, we will get a sticker on our
big class bucket for each full individual bucket. When our class bucket is
full, we will have a bucket-filler celebration!
My intent in using this theory with the kiddos is to help
them learn friendship skills. They’ll be learning how to recognize feelings in
themselves and those around them and to realize how their actions can affect those
feelings. It provides them with the vocabulary they need to explain how they
are feeling. After just two days of using this theory, I had a friend come to
me today and say, “Mrs. Hansen! I just gave my friend a kitchen necklace. I
filled his bucket!” He knew he made his friend feel good, and he felt good
because of it. Now we have a way to talk about it.
As I mentioned in my last post, this is one of my all-time
favorite techniques in preschool! I love it and the kids love it! Let me know
if you’d like to know more about it or if you have any questions.
I’ll blog again on Friday to let you know what else we have
been up to this week!
No comments:
Post a Comment