Student council organized an Easter egg hunt for preschool, preK, and Kindergarten classes. Even the Easter Bunny came to help!
Seventh graders have been working hard during the past few months. The new year has brought more than academics. This year the school has emphasized service to the community. The student participated in creating Birthday Boxes that were donated to a local food pantry. Throughout the school specific items were brought in to donate. Seventh graders’ contribution was birthday candles and plates. Together with items from other classes, and with the help of their prayer partners, the students assembled 75 birthday kits. In a few weeks, seventh and eighth graders are taking a trip to Cradles to Crayons where they will donate their time to help sort and prepare donated items from around the city getting them ready to be distributed to areas in need.
As part of our special class programming, children from preschool 3 through third grade enjoy visiting our library at least once a week! With help from Mrs. Burzynski, students enjoy listening to stories, sharing stories with friends, and reading independently. Students sometimes even write their own stories. During library time, Bruins can further develop their love of books and reading and also have time to sing songs, play, and be creative!
Our students at St Robert Bellarmine School continue to enjoy and thrive in our dynamic Spanish Fun Immersion Program! Each grade level is actively learning through creativity, movement, projects, and hands-on experiences. Take a look at what our amazing students have been working on:
🍎 Pre-K, Kindergarten & 1st Grade – Food!
Our youngest learners are discovering how fun it is to learn Spanish vocabulary! They are exploring food words such as: Apple (manzana), Chicken (pollo), Orange (naranja), Milk (leche) and more! Through songs, visuals, and interactive activities, students are building a strong and joyful foundation in Spanish.
🚂 2nd Grade – Traveling the World!
Second graders are exploring transportation vocabulary and “traveling” to different places while learning words like: Train (el tren), Plane (el avión), Submarine (el submarino), Car (el carro), Bicycle (la bicicleta), Boat (el bote), Hot Air Balloon (el globo), Rocket (el cohete). Learning Spanish becomes an adventure as they imagine journeys around the globe!
🪑 3rd Grade – Learning Through Movement!
Third graders are practicing prepositions in the classroom using real objects like chairs to understand: Above (arriba de), Under (abajo de), In front of (en frente de), Behind (atrás de). Interactive learning helps students truly understand and apply what they learn.
✏️ 4th Grade – Classroom Vocabulary!
Fourth graders are mastering essential classroom items such as: Notebook (el cuaderno), Pencil (lápiz), Eraser (borrador), Scissors (tijeras) and more. They are expanding their vocabulary and confidence every day!
🍽️ 5th Grade – In the Kitchen!
Fifth graders are learning kitchen vocabulary while drawing and designing their own kitchens! They are practicing words like: Table (la mesa), Oven (el horno), Refrigerator (el refrigerador) and more. Creativity meets language learning!
🌎 6th, 7th & 8th Grade – Weather Around the World Project!
Our middle school students are working on an exciting global weather project! They are presenting weekly weather reports from different parts of the world, using vocabulary such as: Hace frío, Hace calor, Está lloviendo, Está nevando, La temperatura es de 80 grados Fahrenheit, and learning about the seasons of the year. They are building presentation skills while expanding their Spanish fluency!
At St. Robert School, our Spanish program is more than a class — it’s an immersive experience that builds confidence, cultural awareness, and communication skills for life.
Our eighth grade boys’ volleyball team has a busy week of games ahead of them. Catch them and all our Bruins at an upcoming game! See schedule here: https://www.gocscc.com/volleyball2026
Fourth grade has been busy preparing for the season of Lent. We celebrated Mardi Gras with beads and learned what the colors mean, where, when and how the day is observed. Students created flip books to help guide them in identifying how they will live out their Lenten season through prayer, fasting, and giving. We also joined the whole school at Mass Wednesday to receive ashes to remind us to turn away from sin and be faithful to the gospel. Students also learned about Augustos Tolton, the first African American priest in honor of Black History Month.
In math, we just wrapped up our unit on multi-digit operations and measurement: multiplication, division, perimeter and area. Next, students will dive into fractions, decimals, and measurement. In reading, fourth graders read a fiction novel of their choosing and are currently in the process of creating an in-depth report on their novel. In language arts, students are learning about different types of nouns, such as common, proper, irregular, and possessive.
Third grade learned about inventors and scientists such as Louis Pasteur, Cyrus McCormick, Thomas Edison, Edward Jennings, and Louis Daguerre. We are also going to learn about good citizenship and what is involved in making economic choices. We are continuing with multiplication and division in math, as well as finding areas of combined rectangles, working on adding areas, and solving one-step word problems using multiplication and division. In English, we have learned about adjectives and subject complements. In reading, we’ve enjoyed reading many new stories, and we are reading the novel Charlotte’s Web. In science, we are learning about wheel and axle systems. We are also looking forward to celebrating Valentine’s Day this week!
Our little Bruins are often in motion, but there are times when they are settled and quiet, working on a fun craft project with Mrs. Menendez. Our PreK students are a bunch of smart cookies! 🍪
Second grade has had a wonderful Catholic Schools Week! They practiced their writing skills by writing letters about why they love our school. They had fun participating in Wacky Olympics, and they had time for quiet reading during Drop Everything and Read. They are also learning to compare three-digit numbers in math class and to practice the Works of Mercy in religion. In science, the class has been learning about the properties of solid objects. They used what they learned to build tall and study towers.
First grade has been having a fantastic time learning and growing together. Here is a peek at what we’ve been up to:
• Math Wizards: We are mastering word problems within 20! The students have been using individual whiteboards to map out their thinking and practice their strategies. It’s been great to see their “aha!” moments as they solve these challenges.
• Writing from the Heart: To celebrate the Valentine’s season, we are practicing descriptive writing. Each student created a heart and wrote about how they can spread kindness to others. It’s been a beautiful way to work on our adjectives while focusing on being good friends.
• Daily Wrap-Up: We love ending our day on a high note! We’ve been finishing our afternoons with a quick, energetic game of Simon Says to practice our listening skills and get a little movement in before heading home.
Kindergarten enjoyed their Christmas break and is eager to make this new year the best one yet! We have so much to look forward to! The 100th day of school is just around the corner which promises to be a fun, active day for our class. We have many activities planned that focus on counting to 100 in many ways: by ones, fives, and tens.
We worked on adding before our break and now we are learning about subtracting in math class. Kindergarten had lots of fun meeting our final Superkids character. In this reading program, each character introduces a new letter sound and builds on the previous sounds. All of us are reading many words phonetically and are so excited about that! We are pros at forming all of our letters and will soon begin writing stories. In science, our focus has been the weather. We are recording our daily weather, learning how a thermometer works, and are using the “wind-watchers” we made with a paper towel tube and streamer, to learn about the wind.
At the end of the month, we’ll also love all the fun that comes with Catholic Schools Week. We are so thankful to be part of this vibrant school community!
Happy New Year from Pre-K & Preschool! We are so proud of our students who did an amazing job at the Christmas Pageant. We wrapped up the year with so many fun days and activities with the Student Council’s countdown. Shopping and pajama/movie day are always a favorite.
Everyone was very excited to come back to school on Monday and get back into our routine. As we begin this second half of the year, we are looking forward to the growth we will see in each student. We will be learning about Winter, and Arctic Animals in January. We will be exploring penguins, polar bears, and snow owls. The students will also be discussing how we keep warm in the winter compared to arctic animals.
We also are looking forward to Catholic Schools week with fun events and Open House, where our families can come and see what we have been up to. Wishing all of our families the best in 2026!
Families and friends gathered to celebrate the greatest story on earth: the story of Christmas in our annual nativity pageant.
Eighth grade has been very busy lately with high school entrance exams and all of their academic work. In English, they are hard at work on their term papers, entering the last phase before turn-in on December 17th. They have found some interesting details about the topics they have chosen! Once that is done they will return to the study of drama. They have also been doing a lot of service work. The students worked the wreath sale, the pancake breakfast, and also helped to cut and tie blankets for a school-wide service project! The eighth graders also enjoyed being able to make and sell their crafts at the holly hobby fair last Friday. Now the students will begin practicing for the Christmas pageant before we go on Christmas break!
Last week, some of our seventh and eighth graders went to the local mall to shop for our Giving Tree families and proved that you are never too old to visit Santa. 🎅
In honor of computer science week and hour of code the students coded their elves to get to the presents!
Our annual Holly Hobby Fair is always a hit with students of all ages! Younger students are paired with their older prayer partners to help shop for their families for Christmas, and on the second day, our junior high students get to sell their own arts and crafts! Thanks to all of our parent helpers who make this event so fun for our Bruins.
Fourth grade had the privilege of welcoming a representative from the Illinois Agriculture Association last week. We learned so much about Illinois soil! Did you know the kind of soil we have here in Illinois is called Drummer soil? We learned about how worms help keep our soil healthy. Worms can push 10X their weight!! Do you know what crop rotation is? Ask a fourth grader, they can tell you.
As part of an all-school service project last week, students and their prayer partners made blankets and cards together for people in need in our community.
We have tons of extracurricular options for students, including Game Club and Art Club. Students love having fun after-school with friends, and parents have extra time before school pickup!
Mrs. Schroeder’s third grade enjoyed a field trip to the Museum of Science and Industry.
Seventh grade has worked hard these first three months of school. Science Fair has dominated a lot of free time with research, experiments, variables, and data collecting. Math class is building a solid foundation in algebraic thinking with rational number operations: adding and subtracting with negative numbers including fractions and decimals. In Social Sciences a major milestone of middle school is underway: the United States Constitution. Exploration and final assessment will be completed before Christmas break.
Spread throughout all the work we do in school, we have some fun, too. Through their hard work, the students earned a break and were able to play games during class. Earlier this year, we joined the eighth grade touring some beautiful churches in Chicago. We also decorated our classroom door for Halloween, created a poster to thank veterans who joined us for mass, and added leaves to our food donation box. Written on the leaves were messages conveying what we are truly thankful for everyday.
Kindergarten students are practicing Latin American dances in their movement class, including the mambo. The mambo is a traditional dance from Cuba, and through it, the children are learning to control their bodies using psychomotor skills. For example, they are learning to recognize the tips of their toes, to move using their heels, and to coordinate the movement of their legs with their arms as they walk.They are also practicing lifting their heads, keeping their bodies upright, and following the basic mambo steps, which follow a “1, 2, 3 — 1, 2, 3” pattern, similar to a waltz. In addition, they are learning to move their arms naturally as they walk, developing coordination. They jump when they need to jump, move their shoulders when the dance requires it, and continue improving their overall motor control. We are also working on five or six other dances, but today we are sending photos of the students practicing the mambo. ¡Buen trabajo, estudiantes!
Our first grade students have learned about farm animals in Spanish. First, they practiced pronouncing the words in Spanish. Then, they learned how to write them, and finally they completed a craft project about that animal from the Spanish book.
Mrs. Kells’s sixth grade is off to an amazing year! So far we have visited Mesopotamia, and while there, we learned how to write in Cuneiform. We have since moved on to Ancient Egypt, where we are experimenting with Hieroglyphics. We have learned some interesting facts about the Nile River, including the fact that it is the only river in the world that runs from South to North. We are making connections to our Religion lessons, too. Students are learning how the stories of Moses and the Ancient Hebrews are connected to the history of Ancient Egypt. This past week we celebrated Veterans Day. We had the opportunity to spend some time with Veterans and heard them tell some of their amazing life stories.
God bless our veterans in our school and parish community, and a special thank you to those who came to our Mass and reception and shared a bit about their time in the service.
After learning how to identify figures of speech, students have cracked the code on what authors are really trying to tell us. They have put on their thinking caps in order to make inferences and use context clues to learn more about characters and a story’s messages. We are beginning a short-answer unit, and I am looking forward to reading their responses after our lively class conversations. It’s been wonderful to see how much their reading and writing capabilities have grown and improved since the very beginning of the year. On top of becoming better readers and writers, students have also been expanding their vocabularies with new spelling words and words picked up while reading our short stories and excerpts in our textbooks. Way to go, sixth grade!
Costume parade and fun with friends on Halloween!
Some of the amazing entries created by our students in the annual pumpkin decorating contest!
For the last three weeks, fifth graders have been tracking the phases of the Moon. One more week until they discover the final stages, before it starts over again. Moon phases are the different ways the moon appears to change shape from Earth as the Sun’s light reflects off it, cycling through eight main phases over about 29.5 days. The cycle progresses from new moon to waxing crescent, first quarter, waxing gibbous, full moon, last quarter, and waning crescent before returning to new moon. “Waxing” means the illuminated portion is growing, while “waning” means it’s shrinking.
Fourth grade has been learning so much! In religion, we are honoring the month of Mary by praying the Rosary as she guides closer to her Son Jesus. We loved meeting with our Pre-K 4 buddies and look forward to meeting with them again soon. In reading, we are enjoying realistic fiction stories. We are also learning about the six types of syllables as well as direct objects and subject compliments. Many fourth graders are continuing to strive for mastery of multiplication and division facts. We are also solving word problems using multiplication and division. In social studies, we are learning about the three levels and three branches of government, our freedoms, and rights and responsibilities as citizens. We also learned about time zones and why they are important. One of our favorites is Friday Fun and our break time where we can chat with our friends, build with Kinex, and collaborate on a beautiful welcome poster. We are looking forward to more learning and fun in fourth grade!
Students enjoy fun with friends in Art and Game Clubs, two of many after-school clubs offered here at SRB!
Wow! It has been a great and busy start to third grade! In religion we are learning about the Sacraments of Christian Initiation, that God wants us to love and help others, and about the four types of prayer. The class is also working on their cursive writing. In social studies we are learning about being good citizens and comparing different communities. In math we are working on our multiplication facts and breaking apart to multiply. In science we are working on activities with magnets, exploring magnetism and gravity. In reading we are working on describing characters in a story, and determining main ideas and supporting details in a text. We are learning about nouns in English. We are looking forward to a great year filled with fun activities! We had a great time at the Run-A-Thon and we can’t wait for Halloween!
The art classroom is getting ready for fall! Younger students have been working on their design skills, decorating jack-o- lanterns, on the look-out for Halloween. Older students have been working on a monster creation exercise that is full of surprises.
Second grade has had a great start to the school year. They have written and mailed letters to friends and family and have also practiced reading with partners and small groups. In math, they are solving addition and subtraction word problems using number bonds, bar models, and other strategies. They have learned about several saints and the Sacrament of Baptism in religion class. Finally, the second graders have been observing the properties of volcanic rocks and river rocks. We are looking forward to a wonderful year ahead!
With this nice weather, first grade is having plenty of fun outdoors during recess and gym class. After all that running around, they also enjoy some cooler, quiet time in the classroom, reading alone or with some friends. Today, with help from the Superkids, we learned all about who, what and where. In math, we are working on fact families. Below is an example of different ways we can make 10. It’s so exciting to be in first grade. We are learning so much and we have so much fun ahead of us!
Wondering what’s new and exciting in Kindergarten? Everything!! How could it not be? There are so many changes from Pre-K and so many new things to learn. Even navigating our lockers is an adventure in learning to open and close them and hang up our new backpacks and jackets. We are learning our new routine and schedule, opening our own snacks and taking care of ourselves all day from 8:00-3:00. Part of that will be learning to tie our own shoes! Beyond all of that, we have met our first two Superkids characters, Cass and Oswald, and are setting off on our literacy adventure with them. Learning to read is lots of fun with the Superkids! We have learned about shapes and the position words above, below, and beside in math class. Religion class is helping us know all about the things that God created. If that is not enough, learning to hold our pencils and crayons properly helps to round out our day. So much to learn everywhere we go, including eating lunch in the lunchroom with the big kids and having fun playing with new friends at recess! Kindergarten is an exciting time for learning many new things.
St. Robert Bellarmine 