Remember in kindergarten everyone would gather around the teacher for story time? Everyone loves listening to stories, even high school kids! In our guard, we have ‘story time’ and it is connected to the development of our team core values. One of our values is to ‘Be good people’ and treat each other with respect. This can be hard with all of our differences in backgrounds, personalities, and belief systems.During story time, we read the children’s book, “Have You Filled a Bucket Today?” http://www.amazon.com/Have-You-Filled-Bucket-Today/dp/0978507517
The book teaches the benefits of kindness through the metaphor of a bucket in a way that is simple and sweet but powerful when implemented with each other.After the story, we talk about what it means for us and how we can be a bucket-filling guard and how we can sometimes become bucket-dippers. We even went a step further and the kids decorated plastic buckets from the dollar store as a physical reminder. Then we created a sign above the band room door: Stop and Fill a Bucket?
This concept can be implemented in connection with many different values. One year, I had several performers who used the word ‘can’t’ and this belief limited them in their abilities and achievements in the color guard. Our story time to target this challenge was the poem “Can’t” by Edgar Guest http://allpoetry.com/poem/8471321-Cant-by-Edgar_Albert_Guest.
By the end of the activity, we agreed that ‘can’t’ was a four-letter word, and we banned it!
Another year, we addressed how we view competition– not as one group against another, but all of us doing our best together! We read and discussed the book “Is There Really a Human Race?” by Jamie Lee Curtis. http://www.amazon.com/There-Really-Human-Race/dp/0060753463
Doing this type of activity transcends the color guard activity, as we have the opportunity to discuss values that the kids will take with them into the real world. Through color guard, we can change our kids and they can change the world!
Who knew story time could be so empowering? :o)
