Irish Step Dancing

Thanks so much to Matthew W.'s sister Tess, (Mrs. Sullivan's former first grade student :o) for coming in to share her talent with us this morning! She taught us about Irish Step Dancing and Irish culture. She even danced to two songs for us. She danced a slip jig to "The Butterfly" and she did another dance to a song called "St. Patrick's Day."

We learned many things from her:

*Female Irish Step Dancers wear special dresses to perform. They are very exquisite and very expensive.
*Girls wear two different types of shoes. One type is a soft shoe, they used to be called ghillies. They have a lot of laces and have a wooden panel on the bottom. The other type of shoe is called the hard shoe. Many people put duct tape on the bottom because the fiberglass bottom can be slippery.
*Male Irish Step Dancers wear different costumes. They wear special shoes, vests and a tie.
*St. Patrick was not actually born in Ireland. He was kidnapped and brought to Ireland to be a slave. Eventually he became a priest, then a bishop. He traveled around Ireland teaching about Christianity.
*The Irish Bible is called The Book of Kells. Some people used to think it was written by angels because even after people studied it closely, they couldn't find one mistake in it.

Thanks again to Tess for visiting. We learned a lot from you!

Click here to see some photographs from the presentation.