I have reserved a place in my classroom for a shoe organizer. Each child will have a bucket with his/her name on it and we will fill the buckets with pompoms, erasers, and other surprises. Every day at group time we will find out who was a bucket filler that day. Bucket fillers will get a pompom to place in their bucket. Teachers will also be on the lookout for bucket filling behavior during the day. This is a purely positive activity and pompoms will not be removed for negative behavior.
When a student fills his or her bucket, the pom-poms are removed and a sticker is added to the bucket to show that it has been filled up one time. By the end of the year, students may have many stickers on their buckets. However, there is no reward for filling up a bucket, and no student is the "winner" for filling his or her bucket the most times. The activity is designed to intrinsically motivate students: it's not a contest or a competition in which students earn an extrinsic reward.
You can learn more about the bucket-filling concept and even order the children's book Have You Filled a Bucket Today? by visiting the Bucket Fillers Web site.
