Sparking Student Motivation with Bucket Filler Themes

Joanne from Head Over Heals for Teaching is having a motivation linky party.  It made me think how do we do this everyday.  It's almost second nature to teachers.  

I wanted to share one idea with you.  In the beginning of the year I read the book Have You Filled a Bucket Today? by Carol McCloud like many of you probably do.  

The kids love it and they are excited to write notes and add little pom poms to each other's buckets.  After a few months the novelty wears off.  I started to think how can I keep the positive motivation going in the classroom and keep the excitement of filling each others buckets. 

So I came up with the idea to create themes!  

On my morning message I give them a theme on what their bucket note should be about.  For example, one day they should write to a friend about how they noticed they did well during math that week.  I encourage the students to write something specific perhaps how they answered a question or tried hard solving a problem.  The next time it might be to write something to a friend about how they noticed something they did during language arts, science, social studies etc.  

Other ideas are how they worked hard doing something, helped someone, used polite words or pick a student that you have never written a note to.

This really gives the students ideas and they need to pay attention to their fellow students a little bit more closely. 

Do you use the bucket fillers in your classroom?  What do you do to keep the positive motivation going in your classroom?