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Museum Tours
February 26th
Francesca Rappa, author of the Melody West series and a senior docent at the North Carolina Museum of Art (NCMA) is available to give museum tours to reading clubs and other small groups by request.
What can children expect from a Melody West Tour? Each tour highlights a select number of works of art in the permanent collection at the North Carolina Museum of Art. While viewing the works of art, children review themes in the novels. Children also review topics in the NC Standard Course of Study in such areas as visual arts, science, social studies, math, and language arts. Children will make enriching connections between the visual arts and the language arts and in the process explore crucial areas of the curriculum.
Melody West Tour #1—Strong Communities, Brave Citizens
Tour #1 focuses on art and social studies for children ages eight through twelve and is paired with Melody West and the Trumpeter Swan. In the novel the heroine discovers a rare copy of the priceless engravings of Audubon’s The Birds of America as well as a letter written by a boy who lived in the American colonies in the 1700s and who fought in the American War of Independence. The tour covers topics that children have learned in school, including the traditions, the leaders, and the citizens who make communities strong. The tour concludes in the Audubon Gallery.
Melody West Tour #2—Art and Nature: Terrestrial and Celestial Wonders
Tour #2 focuses on art and science for children ages eight through twelve and is paired with Melody West and the Great Bear. In the novel the heroine goes to a cabin in the woods, and while exploring the flora and fauna there she learns about the mythologies different cultures create to explain the world around them. The tour covers topics that children have learned in school, including plants and soil, the solar system, weather and climate, animals and their habitats, the human skeleton as a system in the body, electricity, landforms, and energy.
Melody West Tour #3—Three Dimensional Man (coming soon)
Tour #3 focuses on art and mathematics for children ages eight through twelve and is paired with Melody West and the Blue Dancer. In the novel the heroine goes on an adventurous journey with her all-girl chorus to Ukraine and uncovers the fountain of artistic inspiration. She also visits her local museum, which surprisingly is a lot like the North Carolina Museum of Art. On this tour children cover topics in math such as measurement, geometric form, perimeter and area and volume, parallelism and perpendicularity, 2D and 3D figures. They consider these topics while seeing the same works of art the heroine sees, including Henry Moore’s Large Spindle Piece, Jaume Plensa’s Door’s of Jerusalem, the ancient Roman copy of Aphrodite, Rodin’s The Three Shades, and Alexander Archipenko’s Blue Dancer among others.
Melody West Tour #4—Curious Form: Pottery and Other Vessels (coming soon)
Tour #4 focuses on art and social studies for children ages eight through twelve and is paired with Melody West and the Magic Fire. In the novel the heroine and her friends go to a farm in the fictional town of Snow Ridge and help a local potter burn pottery in her salt-glaze groundhog kiln. During the course of the novel, the heroine learns the history of pottery making in the Carolinas and sees that potters belong to a close-knit community whose roots reach back over many generations. The novel celebrates this community and shows that potters are a vital link to the region’s cultural past. Accordingly, the tour covers topics in local history and connects the southern pottery tradition described in the novel to the history of pottery making in general. A variety of vessels made by diverse cultures and times and places are shown.
Melody West Tour #5—Word and Image (coming soon)
Tour #5 focuses on language arts for children ages eight through twelve and is paired with Melody West and the Cherry Blossom. In the novel the heroine travels to Japan with a friend to see the cherry blossom festival and learns about traditional Japanese woodblock printing, kabuki, the tea ceremony, calligraphy and haiku. This is an activity tour. Children focus intensively on a select number of galleries at the museum. They write haiku for Frieseke’s The Garden Parasol in the American gallery, match proverbs with works of art in the African gallery, and study written language in the ancient Egyptian gallery.
Contact us for more information about how to arrange a tour:
