I had lots of fleeting ideas for school blog posts over the summer but none seemed to stick. So now the new school year has started, I had my 13th first day of school on August 21st and we are 3 weeks into the wonder that is Kindergarten!

We started our Year of Bucket Filling by reading these two bucket specific books. We’ve also read lots of story books about kindness and friendship and made explicit connections to bucket filling.

We are making an ongoing list of examples of the students filling other people’s buckets. It tends to be really easy for them to share stories of when their buckets were filled so we posed this challenge to them and it’s been great to hear their examples and to see how they’re learning from each other.

We started our classroom display by counting the number of students in our class and deciding how many hearts we would each need to give every one of our classmates one. Then we got to work writing our first 1 or 2 letters of our names on that many hearts and cutting them out. Some of the students are still working on cutting skills so I quietly sing the scissor song (the one to the tune of Frere Jacques) while they work to help them remember that their thumb goes on top and to hold the paper in their ‘free’ hand.

Once their hearts were ready, we brought them all to the rug and talked again about how they represent their love and caring for each other. Then they distributed them to each other’s buckets and glued them down.

They were so proud of how their buckets came out and love that they are displayed proudly in the classroom.

We began our Closing Circle that day by celebrating that We are Bucket Fillers! What a happy group of kids I get to work with every day.