Follow the Drinking Gourd Across Curriculum and Grade Levels

Paul and Lorraine McLaughlin, Clinicians

Resources for Cross-Curricular Activities

Book: Follow the Drinking Gourd, Jeanette Winter, Published by Dragonfly Books, 1988

Inexpensive. Gives a nice overview of the song with good illustrations. Easily found in most if not all media centers. Using a document camera allows you to project the book for all students to easily see the illustrations.

Apps:StarWalk, RedShift The Astronomy Software, NightSky – All of these Apps have real time sky watch which allows you to point your device to the sky and it identifies the sky as you are seeing it. They also allow you to “travel” around the universe and find various planets, asteroids, moons, satellites, and of course constellations.

Lesson Plans/Worksheets, etc.:

Teachervision.com – Paid membership although they do allow a certain number of free downloads before you subscribe. This site covers all grade levels and disciplines. We have used numerous worksheets/activities to supplement our lessons to include more cross curricular integration. We have also adapted activities to gear them specifically toward the music concepts and skills we are teaching even though the originals were not created specifically with music class in mind.

Enrichment Activities:

  1. Quilts. There is some discussion/debate about whether or not quilts were actually used to help guide and send messages to escaping slaves along the Underground Railroad. This is an interesting enrichment activity to explore the possibility of sending a secret message through the use of a visual such as a quilt.
  2. Talk to the students about how a quilt is made using geometric shapes to create pictures. Use pattern blocks to create some examples
  3. Discuss with the students the meanings of different quilt block patterns (see PowerPoint Presentation for examples). Encourage students to discuss with each other what different things could mean i.e. a cabin, star, dog, tree, flower, etc.
  4. Ask students to choose a single picture they would like to create as a quilt square. They should think of how this picture would be telling a secret message.
  5. Distribute pattern blocks and have students create a quilt square either alone or with a friend.
  6. As you move among the students ask them to describe their secret message.
  7. After the students have created their square using pattern blocks photograph each block and put them together in a photo montage creating a large digital quilt.
  8. Have each student or students explain their quilt square and lead a discussion comparing and contrasting the various squares and their meanings.
  1. Lyric Writing
  2. Students create and perform new verses to the song. The verses should give some sort of direction that is relevant to where the students live. i.e. in the city, near the beach, or rural. Students should also feel free to use some familiar landmarks from the area in which they live.
  1. Constellations
  2. Discuss constellations with the students and show them examples of how the stars act as the “skeleton” of the constellation and then a drawing of a person or animal is made around then. (Use PowerPoint for several examples) Some students find it easier at first to think about how clouds can look like different things to different people. You can then extrapolate that to include star formations.
  3. Distribute plastic glow in the dark stars to groups of students and have them create new constellations. Students can draw their object, animal, person around their star arrangements or leave them as stars only.
  4. A variation is to have students draw notes and rests instead of using stars to create musical constellations. Students take turns playing their “constellations” on various pitched and unpitched instruments.

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