You’d be hard pressed to find anywhere in Waterloo Region a school more brimming with school spirit than Our Lady of Grace CES (OLOG) in Kitchener.

And it’s not by accident. Thanks to Principal Jeff Dinner, the OLOG staff, and the school’s very active School Council there’s a very visible “whole school approach” to building community and creating a positive school climate.

For starters, the school is firmly committed to The Umbrella Project – a program specifically aimed at equipping students, parents, and educators with positive social and emotional coping skills to help them live confident, healthy, and meaningful lives in the face of life’s uncertainties and struggles.

The program is designed to work with the existing school curriculum as well as any well-being efforts that are already in place. The lessons can be used during Religion, Language, Math, Social Studies, History, the Arts, Health and Physed, and more.

As the program is implemented, students learn the skills of emotional wellbeing such as empathy, kindness, growth mindset, autonomy, self-compassion, grit and gratitude. This helps fulfil the WCDSB’s anti-bullying initiative, aiming everyone in the right direction — making bullying an unwelcome behaviour across the school community and bringing a very clear focus to building community through acts of kindness.

And that’s where the “bucket-filling” comes in.

At OLOG, all classrooms are provided a copy of the book “Have You Filled Your Bucket Today”? (Written by Carol McCloud & illustrated by David Messing)

The lesson is simple: everyone carries with them an invisible bucket. Its purpose is to hold good thoughts and good feelings about yourself. You need other people to help you fill our bucket and other people need you to help fill theirs.

Each class has been provided a bucket and a supply of mini-pom-poms.

When a student demonstrates a simple act of kindness or an umbrella project skill for that month (e.g., Empathy, Grit, etc.) and a staff member “catches” them, they are invited to throw a pom-pom in the classroom bucket.

Each Friday, the school plays a fun song (e.g., Farrell Williams, Happy) over the PA system for the whole school, and all classrooms send down their classroom buckets to fill the “OLOG Community Spirit-meter”.

There are marked levels around the spirit-meter and when the school hits a new level the students (thanks to the School Council) receive a whole community reward … because the whole community benefits from acts of kindness!

Of course, there are many things that can fill someone’s bucket.

Mrs. Ortiz – originally from Guatemala – is a Lunch Hour Supervisor at OLOG who LOVES knitting.

As a way to help fill the buckets of some students, she established a lunch hour Knitting Club that draws around 50 participants each week.

And Mr. Dinner and other staff help fill Mrs. Ortiz’s bucket by covering her supervision duties on Knitting Club day!

All of which goes to show, learning at Our Lady of Grace CES is buckets of fun!