Sunday School – all year round

Although summer marked a vacation for this website, it did not mark a vacation for Sunday School!  The children of Christ Church Cathedral, regular members and visitors, were invited to join a special summer programme which Jonathan Bailey, our lead teacher, describes below.

The Sunday School Summer 2013 Art Project

Sunday School at the cathedral did not stop for the summer holidays this year – but we did things differently to celebrate the glorious holiday weather.

As usual we started inside with songs and prayers, but then we all headed outside to the beautiful grounds of the cathedral to learn about different art techniques. One of our Sunday School helpers, an expert art teacher, taught us how to look really closely at plants and to draw what we see, not what we think we see. We drew with Sharpies and not pencils, since sometimes when you draw with a pencil you keep rubbing it out because you’re not pleased with what you’ve drawn, whereas with a Sharpie, you just accept nothing is perfect and you keep looking, trying and concentrating. We also did our best to make our drawings as big as the piece of paper we were given.

Once we had drawn our plants, we then coloured them in with wax crayons before spraying the whole page with coloured water from a spray bottle. All the parts of the paper we had not coloured with wax turned the colour of the water!

In a later session we made our own printing stamps from small tiles of polystyrene and printed our design onto craft paper. It was really hard to get the ink just right so the imprint wasn’t too blurred or too faint – but even professional printers have to practice a lot!

We are planning to show the children’s art in a special Gallery, opening on Sept. 22nd after the 10 a.m. service.  Join us for the opening if you are in Montreal!

We would like to thank our art teacher for helping us to learn these art techniques, and also the generous member of the cathedral who paid for the Sunday School to continue through the summer.