school projects

New Hope Elementary
The Badgett Sisters
and Quilting

Introduction

Characteristics of African American music

Questions for the Badgett Sisters

Thank-you notes

Quilting

Students' quilt squares

Blue Ridge Elementary
Family Night with Wayne Henderson

Cedar Ridge Elementary
Breaking Up Christmas

Central Elementary
Dulcimer Residency and Family Night

Shoals & Westfield Elementary
Square Dancing

The Badgett sisters, Celester Sellars and Connie Steadman, with CMC co-director Glenn Hinson.

A student learning to quilt at New Hope Elementary.

FOURTH GRADE TEACHERS AND STUDENTS at New Hope Elementary in Hillsborough took a journey through the history of African American music, back in time to the Underground Railroad and back to the present-day craft of quilting.
      Their journey began with visits by The Badgett Sisters, Celester Sellars and Connie Steadman. The two sisters won a North Carolina Folk Heritage Award in 1990 for their singing of spirituals, hymns, and gospel songs in the jubilee style, a form of unaccompanied close-harmony singing learned from their father. During their two trips to the school, the sisters performed for students and shared stories from their lives and from the African-American vernacular tradition.
      In addition to funding by the North Carolina Arts Council, teachers received a grant from The Education Foundation for the Orange County Schools to fund the Badgett Sisters' visits.

Teachers at New Hope developed integrated curriculum in conjunction with these visits. The spiritual "Follow the Drinking Gourd" inspired a study of slavery and the Underground Railroad. Students read The Drinking Gourd: A Story of the Underground Railroad by F.N. Monjo, compared the lives of slaves and slave owners, constructed Venn diagrams, and wrote poetry.

  In the book Sweet Clara and the Freedom Quilt by Deborah Hopkinson, a young girl makes a quilt showing the path of the Underground Railroad. After reading this book, students learned more about quilting and constructed their own quilt of musical memories with the aid of a local quilter.

Within their classrooms, students planned interview questions for the sisters and wrote reflections in their journals based on the information they gathered. In addition, teachers used information from the CMC 2001 Summer Conference to help students think about characteristics of African-American music.