The Waterloo Catholic District School Board’s first-ever STREAM Week brought energy and excitement to classrooms across the system, with 45 schools, 488 classes, and more than 8,100 students joining in hands-on activities. One school that truly stood out was St. Kateri Tekakwitha Catholic School, showing how STREAM education can make learning fun, meaningful, and connected to the real world.
At St. Kateri, students brought STREAM learning to life through hands-on projects. They studied plant life cycles and sustainable farming by growing microgreens, explored soil erosion through engineering challenges, and learned about structural design by building hurricane-resistant models with Makedo kits. The school’s robotics team also developed coding and programming skills with support from an experiential learning lead.
Their passion for hands-on learning extended into Earth Week, where students organized a school-wide cleanup to make a real difference in their community.
Throughout the week, the excitement at St. Kateri was unmistakable. “The students were so excited and engaged they didn’t even realize they were learning,” said administrator Richard Settler. “They kept asking for more activities!”
Learning stretched beyond the classroom too. Grade 3 students launched a letter-writing campaign, sending handwritten letters to students in Seaforth (Ontario), Steinbach (Manitoba), and Abbotsford (British Columbia). It was a fun way to build literacy skills while connecting with other communities across Canada.
The arts were also celebrated. The school choir advanced to the next level of the Kiwanis Music Festival, and the knitting club showed how math skills are used in traditional crafts through a special presentation. In Kindergarten, students witnessed life cycles up close by hatching chicks in their classrooms. Across the school, students joined in the Forest of Reading Club’s Blue Spruce voting.
The enthusiasm continues with preparations for Pirates the Musical, where students will apply STREAM skills to create props, manage technical production, and perform on stage.
St. Kateri’s success shows the power of experiential, project-based learning — and highlights how STREAM education is helping students across WCDSB schools connect what they learn in the classroom to the world around them.
