Teaching Kindness with Bucket Filling | SEL Activity & Display

This Bucket Filling kindness activity is a simple, meaningful way to help young students understand empathy, positive choices, and how their actions affect others. Perfect for Foundation, Kindergarten, and early primary classrooms, this resource encourages students to notice, name, and celebrate kind behaviours in a concrete, visual way.

Inspired by the Bucket Filling concept, this activity helps students develop social-emotional skills while fostering a positive classroom culture from the very beginning of the year.

Teachers are using this...

• As a stand-alone kindness activity during circle time or SEL lessons
• As an ongoing kindness display to reinforce positive behaviour
• As part of back-to-school routines, behaviour expectations, or wellbeing discussions
• To support conversations around empathy, inclusion, and respectful behaviour

Students learn that kind words and actions help “fill buckets” — creating a shared language around kindness that can be revisited all year long.

So, what am I getting?

Bucket Filling activity components

• Display lettering to create a classroom kindness display in both colour and black & white options
• low-prep, teacher-friendly layout
• Suitable for whole class, small group, or individual use

This resource is designed with busy teachers in mind. With simple print-and-use components and flexible options for implementation, it can be easily adapted to suit whole-class discussions, small groups, or individual use. Whether you’re introducing kindness at the start of the year or revisiting expectations later on, this activity fits seamlessly into play-based and explicit social-emotional learning lessons without adding to your prep load.