By the Great Horn Spoon!

Students will complete two language arts activities for this lesson. In the first activity, students use folk songs from the era of the California Gold Rush, which are introduced in the early chapters of By the Great Horn Spoon! by Sid Fleishman, to identify folk song motifs in the classical music of Antonín Dvořák. This will be explored by the students' creation of a labeled line drawing of one of Dvořák 's compositions. In the second activity, students will write a letter to Dvořák from the point of view of Master Jack, a character in Fleishman’s novel, inviting Dvořák to continue his American tour into the gold fields of California for musical inspiration.