That's Where God Is

God is all around. We know He is always with us, but when we slow down and take a moment, we often notice His loving presence in new ways.

This week we read the book That's Where God Is. After reading, we took time to reflect on where we feel, see, hear, and notice God in our own lives.

The students wrote and drew their ideas, then created little posters to highlight the moments when they experience God. Their reflections were thoughtful, creative, and full of joy. It was beautiful to see how aware they are of God’s goodness in everyday life.

I hope these activities help all of us pause and remember that God is near, guiding and loving us in every moment.

Gentle Hands and Grateful Hearts: Remembrance Day

As followers of Jesus, we are called to be His hands and feet, bringing kindness, gentleness, and peace into the world. 

We shared the story Beautiful Hands and reflected on the question, “How can we use our hands to show kindness, gentleness, and peace?”

Then we created meaningful poppy art. The small muscles in our hands worked hard as we rolled and dipped tissue paper to bring our poppies to life.

Through our creativity we expressed gratitude and peace, remembering that we are called to be the hands of Christ. 

Today, our school gathered as a community to pray, to remember, and to give thanks for all who have worked and continue to work for peace. 

I hope that when the children look at the poppies pinned to their collars, they do so with deeper understanding and heartfelt gratitude. May we all use our hands to bring gentleness and peace into our world, for we are the hands of Christ.

Pattern Portraits

This week, we blended math and art to create Pattern Portraits! In art, we’ve been practicing how to draw people using shapes and adding details that bring them to life. Putting those skills to work, each student drew a self-portrait. No stick people, here!

Next, we created colorful backgrounds by gluing strips of paper into repeating designs. A pattern means something happens again and again…and again! Students loved seeing how their choices of colors and arrangements made each piece unique.

The final posters turned out amazing! Like I told the kids, “I don’t just like them, I LOVE them!”

Take a look at our wonderful Pattern Portrait creations below!

Rooted in Gratitude & Love

As the end of a joyful school year approaches, we wish to express our deepest gratitude to the incredible support our families all have offered to our Grade 1 classroom. Your generous gifts of time, presence, and love have truly been a reflection of Christ’s service and compassion. Whether you were helping prep materials or joining us on field trips or special events, your dedication has made a lasting impact. Thank you for being instruments of God’s love and for helping us create a classroom community rooted in faith, kindness, and learning. 

This past week, our St. Nicholas Community opened our gym to our volunteers. To show our gratitude, we prepared some spring art to decorate our gym. We drew, coloured with pastels, and painted, creating stunning flower art. 

We put our art together to create beautiful blooms, and proudly displayed these flowers as decorations in our gym!

Thank you for all you've done to help our child bloom. May God continue to bless you for all that you’ve shared with us this year!

Reading, Creating, Discovering and Hatching!

We've begun exploring the parts of a story and together we read The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle:

After enjoying the book, we closely examined Mr. Carle's illustrations. He has a unique method for making designed paper and then cutting it into the pieces for his pictures. 

We followed Mr. Carle's paper-making technique. First, we painted our paper. We added drips, drops, stripes and spots in every colour!

No shortage of creativity in our class!

Once our paint dried, we cut shapes to make butterflies!

Our week ended with tremendous joy and wonder as new life filled our incubator! We were thrilled to welcome several ducklings into the world. Once they’re fully dry, they’ll move into a cozy little “barn” right in our classroom. What a beautiful reminder of God’s goodness!

The Power of our Breath

In life, we as adults know that challenges are inevitable and big emotions will come. Here in class, we're working on experiencing big emotions without being overwhelmed by them. We talked about big feelings we all have felt, such as fear, worry, and anger. We can't avoid these feelings, so how can we move through them? We read Magic Breath, a book that can help us when our feelings feel big. 

We practiced taking deep "magic breaths', and letting the air out slowly. 

We loved making visual reminders of the power of our breath when we have big feelings. A little paint and sparkle brought lots of joy to our room!

We integrate deep breathing into our day in different ways and at different times. Breathing is one tool that can help us move through big feelings. 

The Dot: Make Your Mark!

Today's challenge all began with a book called The Dot! This book encourages children to embrace their own creativity and uniqueness and take a risk! It encourages kids to make a positive mark on the world! 

Using dots and paper strips, plus heaps of creativity, we made spectacular 3D art!

Such colorful, joyful dots! 

Keep making your mark on the world, kiddos! You are amazing little humans who will change the world!

The CROSS: A Symbol of Love

We are exploring the Easter Story and have focused on a very important symbol in our faith; the cross. Jesus suffered and died on the cross for each one of us. The cross is a powerful symbol that reminds us how much God loves us.

We created beautiful burned matchstick crosses. Don't worry, the matches we worked with were already lit, cooled and very safe to touch.We patiently helped one another count out matches, glue, and check and re-check the intricate pattern. This took lots of patience and perseverance!

After they dried, we were able to cut them out. 

The symbol of the cross reminds us of Jesus' everlasting, infinite love for us! 

I don't like them ...

 ... I LOVE THEM!

This week we combined math and art to make Pattern People Posters!

We've been working hard to learn how to draw people using shapes and details. Using the skills that we've learned, we drew ourselves with sharpies. No stick people, here!

We created a background with paper strips, and made sure we glued our coloured papers down to make a pattern. A pattern is the same thing, over & over & over!

Look at our beautiful pattern people posters! Like I told the kiddos, "I don't like them, I LOVE THEM!"

Snowmen to Melt Your Heart

We had such fun this week creating our bird's eye view snowmen!

However, the project started in a boring manner. 

Very.

Very. 

Boring. 

Mrs. Beliveau asked everyone to draw white snowflakes on white paper. 

Ummm ... not exactly exciting, now is it?

However, soon the boys and girls were "ooooohhhh-ing" and "aaaahhhhh-ing"! Using water-based tempera paint, we were able to make our snowflakes appear, as if by magic! 

As our paint dried, we set to work on our snowmen. Using pastels, we traced the three balls of the snowman's body and used our fingers to smudge the pastels inward. 

After Mrs. Beliveau hot-glued the three snowballs together, including a little stack of cardboard in between to make each ball "pop" out, we were ready for the next step ... details!

Noses, arms, buttons, scarves, eyes, and even a few eyelashes were added to give our snowmen personality!

Look how charming!

Kids Who Wiggle!

We wiggle. We shimmy. We squirm, we twist, we bounce! It is highly possible there are ants. In. Our. Pants. Lots of 'em! 6 year-olds just aren't built to sit still, so we change activities about every 5 to 15 minutes. The boys and girls are certainly not expected to sit still all day!

Given that we are the wiggle experts of St. Nicholas, it only made sense that we read the book Lines that Wiggle!

Here is a reading of our wonderful, wiggly story:

Throughout this book is a raised, sparkly blue line that we all loved to touch! This story shared many types of lines that we see in our world. 

We got to work practicing our lines ...

 ... and drew 5 or 6 across a white page. Then we added a small black frame and got to work colouring each "piece" inside the frame.

Look at this colourful, creative work! 

What wiggly, squiggly masterpieces!

Lines inspired from This Old Art Room. 

Lines That Wiggle art project inspired from Mrs. T's First Grade Class. 

The Rainbow Will Come

Our move online this past week was many things; challenging, rewarding, exciting, boring, tricky, interesting, creative, silly, lonely, hilarious, and so much more! 

Understanding our situation, especially as a 6 and 7 year old, is pretty challenging. Our students have been incredibly flexible and adaptable, but have felt the stresses in different capacities. 

At our last Google meet of the week, we enjoyed a beautiful book, Share Your Rainbow. After a storm, a rainbow often appears. Life right now can feel a little stormy, but rainbows are out there, you just have to look. A rainbow is a symbol of hope.

This beautiful picture book features colourful rainbow illustrations from 18 artists and offeres a hopeful perspective. These challenging times will end and we will have family gatherings, birthday celebrations, and time together with friends and family soon. 

After reading the book, to finish off our week of at-home learning, students were invited to paint, draw, and colour rainbows! 

This "storm" will end. Hope is out there, you just have to look for it. Until this "storm" ends, we'll be making our own rainbows and choosing joy whenever we can!