September is always a wonderful month due to the excitement of a new school year.
This September was better; mainly due to the building of community.  When building community you must honour the past, celebrate the present, and look to the future.  Although there were many community building activities this September including our Welcome Back BBQ, Opening Mass, restructuring our lunch routines, and the Terry Fox Run; I want to focus on two events.  These two events are the opening and blessing of our new playground and our annual Grade 6 Southern Alberta Bible Camp (SABC) trip.

It truly takes a community to build a project like a new playground.  Under the leadership of our School Council, especially Amanda and Travis Hillier, our community came together to organize, fundraise, and to build our new playground.  Without the support of all the members of our learning community and support of the greater community of Lethbridge we would not have a new playground.  I mentioned it is important to honour the past; it was wonderful to have past Principal Mr. Roch Bruneau, who opened the old playground, at our opening.  Faith is part of all we do.  I would like to give a big thank you to Fr. Lukas from All Saint’s Parish for blessing our new playground.  We celebrated the present during our opening and blessing, but the big celebration is every recess when we see the playground full with happy students.  Also, here is a short video from Shaw TV Lethbridge’s ‘Go!’ of the finished product: 

The other community builder was our annual Grade 6 SABC.  Although it is just for our Grade 6s, our whole community comes together to support this annual trip.  Our Grade 5 parents fundraise throughout the year and our larger community supports all the fundraising events.  The actual event truly builds community amongst the Grade 6 students and staff.  Doing a variety of recreational activities together, teambuilding tasks, and simply spending three days together builds a strong sense community among all the participants.  It is great to start off the school year building community.  For the first time in a long time all our Grade 6 students attended the SABC trip.  As we look to the future, we are already starting to plan for next year.

There are a lot of important learning activities that occur at a school, but all of these need to occur on the strong foundation of community.