PHDS students learn about mitzvot by filling a bucket

The bulletin board by the front office. /PHDS

On Jan. 11, Providence Hebrew Day School launched a program to help students visualize the importance of interpersonal mitzvot. It will continue until Purim. The idea behind the program is that we all have imaginary buckets above our heads that get filled when we are nice to each other and when others are nice to us. When we harm someone or another person mistreats us, the buckets empty. The goal is to help students learn to fill their own buckets and those of others.

Each classroom in Pre-K through Grade 5 has a bucket that the teachers can fill with pompoms when they see the students interacting appropriately with each other and with adults. When the classroom buckets are filled, they are emptied into a bucket outside the front office. The aim is to fill that office bucket. Once this bucket is filled, the students will receive a special treat and then start filling it again.

The middle-school students serve as bucket-filling ambassadors; on Jan. 11, they made their own badges and “passports” that identify them as such. They have a list of “giving” and “respectful” behaviors to focus on and papers on which to report these behaviors to Miriam Esther Weiner, the principal. They have been given goals for each week or multiple weeks and prizes they can earn. The mailbox in the principal’s office is quickly filling up!  Among the notes so far have been: “I complimented someone … and I made her feel better about her work” and “I didn’t tell someone he/she was being ridiculous when I usually would.”

The students in Pre-K through Grade 5 watched a video presentation of the book “How Full is Your Bucket for Kids,” by Tom Roth and Mary Reckmayer, that presents this concept in a child-friendly way.

Parents are invited to borrow the book from the school so they can use it in discussing this program with their children.

– Providence Hebrew Day School