Andrea Curran is trying her best to make a difference.
The St. Hubert's elementary school Family Studies teacher, has decided to get her online students to get involved in a project for a very worthy cause.
The elementary students have worked from home sewing 40 sets of hearts which were delivered earlier this week to the North Bay Regional Health Centre.
"The idea I had seen online where people had knit two hearts to donate to the hospital and because I teach hand sewing I just tried to adapt it to the hand sewing part," said Curran.
"Because most of the kids have come two years in a row, most of them have the skills and the ones that did not, I had a tutorial for them online for them to follow through on how to create them."
Curran, who has been teaching at the school for the past 17 years, got the students to do the handiwork and drop in off at collection bins at respective schools in the area.
She says finding sewing supplies during the COVID-19 pandemic was a concern.
"I gave them options for filling and how to find fabric and how they can create them and I gave them a week and a half at home to work on them using different ideas and things they can add to them," she said.
While the project was not graded, Curran gives high marks to the students who participated.
"For the first round, during this pandemic and figuring out how to collect them and sterilize them, I am very happy with the amount we were able to collect," she said.
The hearts were delivered to hospital officials home and were eventually given out to patients in the palliative care and dementia units.
"It is just a way for one patient to have one heart and the family have the other so they can feel connected," she said.
"The hopes would be that the hearts would be reunited again."
With the positive feedback she has received, Curran is hoping to continue to pull on the heartstrings of the unique two hearts program to include all her 250 students this fall.
