As I was researching Georgia for our United States Geography or maybe a bit of US history lesson, I learned that the Trail of Tears originated here. So, I decided that making a Cherokee Rose and explaining its significance when paired with the Trail of Tears seemed like a perfect lesson. So you can decide if you are going to say this is a history lesson (which realistically it is) or a geography lesson (which is what it was taught as part of our Georgia Unit).
Okay, all of that was from Past Ticia 2011, but now Future Ticia 2025 wants to add in a few things. This is from a rather sad part of US History. It’s from that crazy time of Westward Expansion where the United States made a lot of promises and they broke them.
History is full of broken treaties. No matter what country we follow or what tribe or people group we follow, they will break treaties. It is just part of who humans are. It is a very sad reality.
But, this is part of the sad history of MY country, and it’s important to acknowledge when the mistakes of the past as well as the parts that we are proud of.
(There are affiliate links in here)
Trail of Tears Resources
I found Trail of Tears (Step into Reading). Now I remember reading this book before with the kids, but I can’t remember what state we did it with. Either way, it’s a long book, so I edited it down a little for reading aloud.
And these are a couple of videos I found to share with my kids when they were in high school and we covered the topic:
I think this one would be an interesting one to discuss with older high school kids, as it is clearly giving you some opinions in what is shared.
And then this one is a short documentary on the topic.
This was part of the Westward Expansion video list I put together back when we studied this several years ago, so there might be better videos out now; these are what I was able to find 5 years ago.
Trail of Tears Craft and mini-book
When I was researching Georgia and its state flower, the Cherokee Rose, I found a legend for how it came to be (which I can sadly no longer link to because that site is gone). However, if you JOIN MY NEWSLETTER and go to the subscriber page and grab the Georgia notebooking pages, you’ll find a summarized version of the legend.
Supplies: 5 petal shapes ( used a punch I had, but you could just freehand it), a piece of blue paper for the background, a scrap of yellow paper, a hole punch, and glue (I pictured glue and used it, but I think you could use gluesticks, so I linked that)
- Fold your paper in half. This is only necessary because we are turning this into a minibook.
- Put 5 lines of glue on your paper in a star shape
- Arrange petals on the glue (I apparently didn’t take a picture of this step)
- Punch out somewhere between 5-10 circles per flower. The kids LOVED this step and argued over who got the hole punch next.
Finished product.
On the inside, they glued a slip of paper explaining the legend. To be completely true to the legend, I needed to add the leaves, but it didn’t work for what we were trying to do.
More Great US history lessons
- Transcontinental railroad
- Tall Tales: Jean Lafitte
- PT Barnum
- Trench Warfare
- World War 2 field rations lesson
TradingCardsNPS, CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
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