Saint Valentine's Day has just passed and Lent is around the corner. Thus, many of us are thinking about love as well as praying, fasting, and giving. That makes now a great time for gifting forward a little kindness and fun with a Love Bucket!
I found the idea of love buckets at Shauna and Co when I was planning activities for a local homeschool gathering in honor of Saint Valentine. Right away, I knew I wanted to adapt the idea for our celebration.
Since my children already love egging people and playing St. Nicholas for neighbors, I had no doubt that they'd delight in a new St. Valentine's Day-into-Lent tradition of "love bucketing" others. So, it was I penned two poems so we could begin the tradition by making Love Buckets with friend so secretly gift to others.
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Since I had already planned to take a picture walk through Saint Valentine (Tompert) at our party and to read Saint Valentine (Sabuda), I wrote one poem to harken back to those stories.
Since I also planned to share a perennial favorite, Somebody Love You, Mr. Hatch, I wrote a second poem related to that story.
This poem, especially, I think can be used as for anytime of year Love Bucket to share a random act of kindness, Work of Mercy, or Lenten giving mini-mission.
As you can see, I typed each poem up in a variety of fonts. I, then, printed enough of the poems so that the children at our party could choose one version they liked, cut it out with fancy scissors, glue it to cardstock, and decorate it as a bucket tag to put on some inexpensive lidded buckets a friend found for us.
I meant to laminate the children's decorated tags so that the tags would be durable through much of love bucketing passed forward, but, unfortunately, when I had packed all the supplies for the party in my minivan, I had forgotten my laminator. So, I simply had the children hole punch their cardstock tags and tie them with ribbon to their buckets.
The children then were encouraged to bring their buckets home, fill them with treats and decide who to "love bucket".
My children could not wait to do that and are so excited to add this random (and secretive) act of kindness to our annual traditions. If yours would be, too, please feel free to use a FREE PRINTABLE of the Love Bucket poems I wrote as you and yours make your own love buckets to pass forward.
I'd be delighted to hear about your "love bucketing" fun!
