When Senior Brooke Mattson asked ‘how do you think you can make Rosy Mound a better place?’, four eager third grade hands instantly shot into the air.
Student Senate members participated in an anti-bullying campaign Tuesday Jan. 8 at several elementary schools. Senate split into small groups and used the children’s book “Have you Filled a Bucket Today?” by Carol McCloud in third grade classrooms throughout the district to spread some good feeling and teach kids about good ways to show kindness to one another.
The lesson was that every person carries around an invisible bucket with them that contains good feelings. Essentially, if kindness is shown, a person’s bucket is “filled” with happiness. This provided a visual example of what kindness and being nice to one another does to a person.
The presentations began by asking the students ways to “fill each other’s buckets,” before reading and acting out the story by McCloud. Kids came up with answers like nice, kind and helpful. After reading, the students were asked again and were able to come up with and think of more specific things they can do on a daily basis such as saying nice things or smiling at each other.
Rosy Mound teacher Kathy Lampen appreciated seeing the high school kids helping out.
“[The idea of being a ‘bucket filler’] is very important and a great lesson for them to hear and just a great reminder to us all,” Lampen said.
Student Senate chose to go beyond the high school walls and reach out to students of all ages.
“We came to the lower-lever elementary schools just to spread the message of anti-bullying and kind of spread the good cheer of being nice to people and not being a downer on others and just spreading the message through a good book,” Senior Chris Semrinec said.
Semrinec also said the elementary approach was much better in terms of positive feedback from the students in the younger grades.
“We have found that this is really the age to kind of try to nip this problem in the bud and so that’s where we started,” Semrinec said.
Third-grader Poppy Balkema enjoyed having the high school students in class to talk to.
“I thought it was cool so we could see it from their point of view instead of our teachers,” Balkema said.
Third-Grader Toby Robbins agrees.
“[The presentation] was really fun because we get to talk with older kids,” Robbins said, ‘because they are different from talking with our friends because they have more experiences and they made us a really cool poster to hang in our classroom so that is really cool.”
