Our school typically celebrates Catholic Schools Week using the daily themes or the overall theme, which is currently “Learn, Serve, Lead, Suceed.” My next few posts will be concrete ideas for how to celebrate first the daily themes, and then the overall theme.
Celebrating your community:
1.Do a school-wide service project.
Each year our school does a service project during Catholic Schools Week. Some years we collect toiletries and with the two other Catholic schools in the valley we create Valentines Day boxes filled with supplies for low income elderly people in our community . One year we collected items for a local veterans hospital. My favorite was a school wide project where we made hundreds of bagged lunches for homeless people in our neighborhood. The younger grades decorated bags and wrote encouraging notes, the middle grade made the lunches and the older grades delivered them to the food pantry across the street from our school. Service projects celebrate the contributions of Catholic schools to their communities and also build community within the school.
2. Recognize Catholic women and men who serve in your community.
We normally kick off CSW with an all school assembly celebrating the themes of the week. One year the group planning the assembly had the idea to contact leaders of our community and have them come talk about faith and service in their professions. We had a fire fighter, librarian and judge share with students how their faith impacted their work and motivated them to serve the community. This would be a great way to get parents of your students involved too. If an assembly wouldn’t work, having a guest speaker come to your class could be a great way to hear from community members what Catholic education means in their lives.
3. Celebrate your school community.
For many years each class would come up with a “10 reasons we love our school” list and post it outside their classroom on the wall. I also think this would be a good prompt to send home to parents and families- ask them to send you their own lists to add to the class display.
What are some ways Catholic schools make a difference in your community? How can you celebrate that? Please share any great ideas you have in the comments!
