Teaching the Golden Rule
As a parent I love when I find opportunities that help illustrate the beauty of “The Golden Rule.” It’s for this reason that I love the book, Fill A Bucket: A Guide to Daily Happiness for the Young Child by Carol McCloud, Katherine Martin & David Messing. I designed a craft project to do with my kids that I thought was a nice complement to the book. It was really sweet to see how excited my kids got about the idea of sharing love, and watching them hand out their hearts to their loved ones (their classmates, their babysitter, the family dog).
Make Buckets of Love with your kids.
READ Fill A Bucket: A Guide to Daily Happiness For Kids to your kids (or simply use our text below).
FIND a bucket. We found ours in the gardening section of our local hardware store or you can click here to purchase simple colored buckets.
DECORATE the outside of the bucket with hearts. You could use heart stencils, free-form hearts or even cool anatomical hearts from online printouts or old books. Use Mod Podge to collage paper onto your bucket.
CUT hearts out of colored construction paper to fill your Bucket of Love.
COLOR, PAINT and DECORATE your hearts however you please.
WRITE messages to the recipients of each heart. If your child can't yet write, help them out. They will definitely have sweet ideas and know what they would like to say.
GIVE out hearts from your Bucket of Love, to fill other people's buckets. Hopefully you will get some in return!
Imagine we all have a bucket inside of us that holds all our feelings. When our bucket is full of good feelings, we feel great. When our bucket is empty or has bad feelings, we feel sad. We can fill someone’s bucket with good feelings when we say or do nice things. We can empty someone’s bucket when we do or say mean things. Go out and share your love with others.
Here are some examples of things you can say to fill someone’s bucket with good feelings:
“I love you”
“Would you like to play with me?”
“I really like your drawing”
“You make me laugh”
Here are some examples of things you can do to fill someone’s bucket:
Give someone a hug.
Help someone clean up.
Make someone a card.
Make someone laugh.
This idea was inspired by the book Fill A Bucket: A Guide to Daily Happiness For Kids
- By Tracey Stewart