March 24, 2017
Last year, the seventh grade class at St. Catharine started dance classes once a week with Mr. Clark, a professional dance instructor. The class decided to have some fun with dancing, and created a little friendly competition among the class, calling it “Dancing with the 7th Grade Stars.” The students had so much fun with the show that they decided to put on another competition this year. It was called “Dancing with the 8th Grade Stars”. The students divided themselves into four different groups of dancers. Caroline Carmon and Max Taylor decided to work behind the scenes as the technology crew. Of course, what’s a competition without hosts? Kami Kortokrax and Maggie Agra chose to host the show. Each group had to pick a song, from the movie of their choice, to choreograph a dance to perform in front of the entire student body, teachers, and parents. The groups spent study hall, recess, even after school time, and every other free second they had in the gym creating and rehearsing their dances, creating slides for the projectors, or writing the scripts for the hosts. The students weren’t the only ones spending their free time preparing for the competition. Mrs. Grogg, our gym teacher, recorded all of her 3rd quarter grades early so that she could spend her teacher record day working with each group that came to school on their day off.
The dance took place on March 24th and with all the hard work that was put into this show, the results were even better than expected. Mrs. Wiesner, Mr. Clark, Mrs. Quinlivan, and Mrs. Knox judged each group based on creativity, presentation, and choreography. The scores for each group were extremely close, but the winners danced to a song from the movie Grease and came only two points short from a perfect score. The winning team consisted of Katie Heuser, Colleen Sweeney, Annie Reis, Caitlin Abel, Alyssa Carfagna, and Annamarie Wills. The whole competition was a success and this year’s eighth grade class grew even closer throughout the whole experience. Dancing will definitely be remembered not only by the graduating eighth grade class, but by the entire school who sat in the stands cheering on each group.
-Kami Kortokrax