Compliment Day: 2011 - 2012

During the 2011 - 2012 school year, we celebrated Compliment Day by using a theme based on the book, Have You Filled a Bucket Today? by Carol McCloud. During our annual Community Readers' Day, we asked each community reader to read this book to their selected classes as a way to introduce the theme of filling buckets. This book promotes the idea that each person carries with them an invisible bucket that is filled with their good thoughts and feelings. People who say and do nice things for others are called Bucket Fillers since their good deeds fill other people's buckets. However, people who say and do mean things to other people are called Bucket Dippers and are responsible for taking good thoughts and feelings out of another's bucket.

We encouraged our students to become Bucket Fillers by putting pom-poms into a classroom bucket each time a compliment was given by either a student or a staff member. Once these smaller classroom buckets were full, students brought them down to the main lobby of the school and emptied all of the pom-poms into a larger bucket that represented the school as a whole. For the third and final week of The Compliment Connection, we celebrated Colors Week during which time students and staff wore a different color each day that corresponded with the colors of our five school values. As the weeks progressed, visuals of bucket filling began to fill the hallways, bulletin boards, and classroom walls. The following pictures display this theme throughout the school:

We also redecorated our Complimen"tree" with pictures of full buckets to further highlight our theme of bucket filling and the importance of being kind to one another. The picture below shows the Complimen"tree" full of buckets.

The Compliment Connection was a success! We even made it into the local newspaper, The Landmark. There was a short article with a picture of a few community readers, specifically Police Chief Gary Chamberland, Recreation Department Director, Judy Janda, and Director of Children's Services at Conant Public Library in Sterling, Danielle Mattei. There are also a few other books that reinforce the idea of bucket filling. Although we have not yet used them within the classrooms, we may use them in the future as a way to continue to highlight the importance of bucket filling. I have included pictures of these books below:

There are also a number of websites that discuss the concept of bucket filling and contain many different bucket filling ideas and activities. The links below will take you to some of these websites. The last website will take you to a video with Carol McCloud, the author of Have You Filled a Bucket Today?, who explains the concept of bucket filling and bucket dipping. These links can also be found under the Resource section of this website.

https://bucketfillers101.com/

https://www.pinterest.com/Teachingwithmeld/bucket-filling/

Feel free to click on the documents below to access activities, coloring sheets, and a list of complimentary words, all of which were used by teachers and staff during the Compliment Connection at Houghton Elementary.