On Tuesday 28th January, 28 students from the De Lisle Mission team and 12 key stage 4 dancers went to celebrate the feast day of our Trust, St Thomas Aquinas.
We were one of 22 schools and were really proud to be one of the four secondary schools. The theme of this year was the issue of deforestation in the Amazon rainforest. Because of this each school received a tree, blessed by Bishop Patrick, to take back and plant in their school grounds.
As part of the opening ceremony the key stage 4 GCSE dance group performed a brilliant liturgical dance alongside some of our feeder primary students. You can read more about that below.
Each school was then paired with another in the aim of making stronger links with each other. We were paired with St Paul’s school in Leicester and look forward to seeing more of them.
After hymn practise, a talk from CAFOD and the school pairing, Bishop Patrick led us all in the celebration of the mass.
It was definitely a day to remember.
Alex – year 8
We were excited to have been asked to perform at the St Thomas Aquinas Feast Day Celebration with the theme of deforestation. We were given the task of creating a dance about looking after the environment. We decided to go down the route of deforestation after finding and inspirational spoken word piece which had the message we wanted to convey. We then followed the spoken word with Michael Jackson’s Earth Song.
After we found our music we began to choreograph the dance as a group. Closer to the day we travelled to St Mary’s Primary school in Loughborough to teach 12 primary school children (4 from St Mary’s, 4 from Sacred Heart and 4 from St Charles’) a section of the dance to get more people involved across the MAT. The younger students picked it up really quickly and we really enjoyed the collaboration.
A week later we travelled to the venue and performed the routine to the representatives of the 22 schools in the MAT with Bishop Patrick in the front row. All the feedback we received was really positive.
We all really enjoyed the experience and the day as a whole was very insightful and hope for other opportunities to perform like this again.
Ella, Year 11
