Students from Mount Carmel Elementary School Waterbury CT: Walking in the Footsteps of Laudato Si

This year Our Lady of Mount Carmel School in Waterbury, Ct, grades Pre-K 3 to 8, will be working hard at learning Laudato Si and putting its principles into practice. Every child from grades 1-8 has a notebook where they will write their activities and thoughts about caring for our common home. Every two weeks they engage in a new practice.  This first week they are studying and learning about “A Place Called Home, Pope Francis’ theme for the Month of Creation.

GRADE ONE: Grade One has begun recycling.

Grade Six is doing mosaics of some of God’s wonderful and amazing Creatures, extinct or threatened by extinction.

Grade Seven: Students are growing in the awareness that the impact of climate change is disproportionately felt by the poor.  Last year, during Covid restrictions, 7th grade students in Our Lady of Mount Carmel School led a campaign to assist the homeless in the winter cold. Along with all the other students in the school, they collected warm things for protection from the cold. They took a thermal hat, thermal socks and gloves, wrapped them in a blanket and tied it all up with a bungee cord. Everything was new. The students wrote a note to whoever would receive these and stuck it in the bundle. When we had jackets or tarps, we added them too. Sr. Patricia drove around the city and distributed these blanket bundles to the homeless who wander the streets.

This 2021-2022 school year the Seventh Grade students want to add boots to the bundle, so they are having a campaign of “Boots for Christ” which will raise money to buy winter boots.  We will be selling boot cards for $5.00.

“We will go to shelters and soup kitchens where the homeless congregate and bring the boots so they can get a pair that fits them. Most of the homeless have very bad feet so it is important that the boots fit. Clean socks will be in every boot.