Children in Ocean class (Years 3 and 4) have just finished a project based on ‘Have You Filled a Bucket Today?’ a book by Carol McCloud which encourages kindness, compassion and appreciation. Here’s what they had to say:
“Basically everyone has an invisible bucket, you can’t see it but it’s there. Whenever you are kind and nice to other people you feel good so you are filling their bucket and also your own bucket too. We made buckets and coloured them and stuck them on our classroom wall so that we could actually put messages in them - we can fill our own buckets with things we’ve done or put messages in other buckets. Things like ‘I saw my friend playing tennis and was really encouraging’ and ‘my friend dropped some books so I picked them up.’ ”
“It’s sort of like good karma, if you are kind then other people are more likely to be kind back. Just like if you are bad to someone they might be bad to you too. When you make someone feel good it’s called bucket filling, but if you do something that makes someone feel bad you are called a bucket dipper.”
“I think it’s better to have fewer messages in your bucket that mean more instead of lots of messages that just say ‘you’re cool’ and stuff. All the messages are nice but some people take more time to think of things and I try to do that. I wait until something comes along that I really want to put in instead of just writing anything. That makes me feel better.”