Hi, Future Ticia 2026 here, and I’m just back from driving the length of Tennessee twice. One thing I love about driving cross country is you really get to see the country and get a feel for it. I’ve driven through Memphis and seen the town, and Nashville, and seen the sights there, and the feel for the hills and the mountains, and so this geography lesson is going to be fun to revisit. We learned about about Tennessee twice, first when the kids were little and then again when they were in high school as a quick review.
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Our original Tennessee Unit
Tennessee was one of those states where I had lots of ideas, but none of them worked quite right…….. Sigh.
What all is in here:
- Swamp Angel (Tarnation hit the stars and looked like this)- This is a super cute tall tale, and I’m always a sucker for tall tales. I look forward to Montana when we get to read about her further adventures.
- Sequoyah– The man who brought writing to the Cherokee people. You can see our plan for this on the lower left hand side. This activity was really a bit over my kids, but it was a good stretch for them.
- Andrew Jackson– I still find this president amusing. I don’t know why. I got to bring him up again when we got to Louisiana, that was fun.
- Luck with Potatoes- Another Tennessee tall tale, or maybe this author just made it up, either way it’s a fun story about a farmer who has some bad luck until he plants potatoes. I highly recommend this book if your kid likes silly books.
- Tennessee State Symbols- Princess was happy because they have a state horse. (this is now on my Subscriber page if you JOIN MY NEWSLETTER)
Casey Jones Unit– This was one I knew the name, but didn’t know too much about this real-life hero. That’s always a fun surprise for me to discover something I didn’t know too much about. Future Ticia 2026 adding in that I discovered I had two Casey Jones Unit, so I combined them into one.
Done, but not included in the lapbook, which I guess is really more of a notebook.
Davy Crockett peg dolls– I found a great book for this, and I really wanted to make coon skin caps, but wasn’t sure how to do that in a way that made sense with 6 other kids there, and that could be completed in a timely manner.
So the Davy Crockett peg doll was born. He’s kinda disturbing.
Banjo Granny- the world’s cutest book, and each time we looked at the illustrations we found more in it. Afterwards, we made a banjo for our dolls with a popsicle stick and some brown card stock. Very fun and very popular.
Tennessee Unit resources
Okay, first let’s go and find all of the various different online sites you can grab some useful information so you can look to see if your library has different books than my library has.
- National Geographic Kids– I love Nat Geo Kids sites
- Tennessee Government facts– boring but factual
- Britannica Kids– the first time this has shown up in my search
And now let’s get the YouTube videos on Tennessee, let’s see if I can find some videos that aren’t painful to watch… Fingers crossed everyone.
All right, first we have the vaguely creepy puppet, that really isn’t that bad:
And then there’s the always painful Homeschool Pop, which even years later I can hear his voice in my head causing psychic damage.
Here’s a rather slow-talking video about the state symbols:
Okay, now let’s look at
Tennessee books
I need to look up my booklist, one second as I pull up my library list. These are not the original books I used, some of them are, and not all of them are ones I’ve specifically read yet as I’m updating this without having gone to the library to pull them off the shelf.
- Tennessee– I always like to get a book like this because it is useful to have a good nonfiction book just about the state in general. Books like this will usually also have a nice set of pictures
- Swamp Angel– This was a fun tall tale, and I do remember this one. I had originally had an entire post written on this, but I realized later that no one was going to click and read this very obscure tall tale which maybe 20 people care about. At some point I might write a general post about tall tales writing lesson instead.
- Dust Devil– This is maybe the sequel to Swamp Angel, or maybe it comes first. It definitely feels like the sequel.
- Lorraine: the girl who sang the storm away– this is one of the books that is new on the list that wasn’t there before, it was published in 2018 so it makes sense I didn’t read it in 2012
- A picture book of Davy Crockett– I love this series, David Adler is a national treasure
- The Quickest Kid in Clarksville– Having just returned from Clarksville, this book has caught my eye and since I just got a notification that a book I put a hold request on I might grab it
- Flossie and the Fox– This feels very Aesop’s fables in style, but I don’t remember it
- Tarra and Bella: the elephant and dog who became best friends– A cute story of an elephant and dog who became friends
- Dolly Parton– this series is cute, and Dolly Parton is so popular in Tennessee
- Coat of Many Colors by Dolly Parton– In recent years she has become so popular because of all her literacy work
- The Big Day– I have a vague memory of this, but not really but it’s a great book about black women getting the right to vote and how they worked with the other suffragettes to gain that right in the early 1900s
- Step right up: how Doc and Jim Key taught the world about kindness– I am so curious about this book. With each book I look at, I become more and more convinced I’m going to end up at the library checking out all of these
- The heroine of the Titanic: a tale both true and otherwise of the life of Molly Brown– It’s out of print, but I’m going to link to this copy, so if you find it you can snatch it up
- Sequoyah: the Cherokee man who gave his people writing– I remember thinking it was so cool to have the book in both English and Cherokee
- Sequoyah and the Written Word– I haven’t read this, but I wanted to grab a few more of the books about him and my library now has a load of them
- Sequoyah and His Talking Leaves: A Play about the Cherokee Syllabary– again, just haven’t read it
- What’s Your Story, Sequoyah?– I am so wildly amused how many of the covers use this exact same image of him.
- Casey Jones– Sadly, I don’t think the library still has the Casey Jones book we used before and so I need to search up that book. I’ll add it as the last book on the list
- Casey Jones– Neither of these do I know anything about
- I dream of trains– I have vague memories of this book, but nothing in particular
- Okay, I tried to look up the book I was thinking of, but I think I combined it with another book and Steven Kellog does not have a Casey Jones book.
Modern Tennessee Unit
All right when the kids were older we did a quick review where we just filled out the notebooking pages, and did not do the mini-books because I figured out the kids primarily filled them out to make fun of the books. So why do that to myself?
The fun facts or random things I have written down that I liked, or things I know now:
- Tanasi- the Cherokee name for village
- one of the state animals is a raccoon
- From having visited there, there are several very interesting towns: Clarksville is named for a Revolutionary War general, Boonesville is named for Daniel Boone
- And I also think it’s amusing the number of people from Tennessee who became famous in Texas: Sam Houston
More geography lessons
Pictures I used:
- By Warren LeMay from Chicago, IL, United States – AT&T Building, Commerce Street and 3rd Avenue, Nashville, TN, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=162537924
- By No machine-readable author provided. Blinutne assumed (based on copyright claims). – No machine-readable source provided. Own work assumed (based on copyright claims)., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=667186
- By Mustbeotherwise – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=182762501
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