Grade 2 History and Social Studies Week 17 | Teacher Guide

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Day 81: Legend or History?

Standard: SS24.2.15

Practice record: What do we know? How do we know it?, printed on the Week 17 Practice Workbook.

Worked example: A book says a famous man once jumped over a whole river in one leap. No one at the time wrote it down. Is this documented history or legend? Worked answer: Legend.

1. 1806.
2. Any one of: he was born in Massachusetts in 1774; he planted nurseries of young apple trees on the frontier; he sold apple trees to settlers.
3. It first appeared in a book in 1806, after Washington died, and no record from Washington’s own life tells of it, so no one can check that it happened. Accept any answer about no record from the time.

Teaching note: The table’s second column is filled in by the child (history, legend, history, legend). The point is not that legends are bad: they tell us what people valued (the cherry tree story was written to teach honesty). Teach the habit of asking who recorded something and when.

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Day 82: Traditional Stories of the First Peoples

Standard: SS24.2.15

Practice record: The Terrapin and the Rabbit (a retelling of a Cherokee story), printed on the Week 17 Practice Workbook.

Worked example: A grandmother tells her grandson a story that her grandmother told her. What kind of tradition is this? Worked answer: Oral tradition.

1. Passing down history, lessons and stories by telling them out loud.
2. The Poarch Band of Creek Indians (Poarch Creek).
3. Answers vary. Examples: do not brag or think you cannot lose; a smaller person can win by thinking and working with others. Accept a lesson supported by the story.

Teaching note: The retelling is original to this curriculum. It follows story 20, How the Terrapin Beat the Rabbit, in James Mooney, Myths of the Cherokee (1900), told by Cherokee storytellers of the Eastern Band in North Carolina. Mooney’s version ends with a note about a ball-game custom; that part is ceremonial and is left out. Present the Cherokee and Muscogee peoples as living nations, not only as people of the past. Week 16 covered their forced removal; refer back to it only if the child asks.

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Day 83: Black American Stories and a Folk Hero

Standard: SS24.2.15

Practice record: Brer Rabbit and the Briar Patch (a retelling), printed on the Week 17 Practice Workbook.

Worked example: Steel drivers used hammers and steel drills to make holes in rock. Is this documented history, legend or unknown? Worked answer: Documented history.

1. He begged Brer Fox not to throw him into the briar patch, so Brer Fox did it, and the briar patch was his home.
2. Leeds.
3. Steel drivers cut railroad tunnels: documented history. John Henry beat a steam drill: legend. Where the race happened: unknown. Explanation example: we have records of steel drivers, but no record shows John Henry’s race. Accept the three labels with one reason.

Teaching note: The briar patch retelling is original to this curriculum. Credit the tale to the Black storytellers who carried it, with roots in African trickster tales; the trickster was a way for people with little power to tell of the small and clever outwitting the strong. Joel Chandler Harris, a white newspaper writer, printed versions in 1880; his dialect and plantation frame are not used here, and the version with the sticky tar figure is not used. Tell John Henry’s death in the one plain sentence given; do not dwell on it.

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Day 84: Songs That Tell Our History

Standard: SS24.2.15

Practice record: “The Star-Spangled Banner,” verse 1 (Francis Scott Key, 1814), printed on the Week 17 Practice Workbook.

Worked example: Who wrote the words of “The Star-Spangled Banner”? Worked answer: Francis Scott Key.

1. British soldiers.
2. 1931.
3. He saw the American flag still flying over the fort. The verse says the rockets and bombs gave “proof through the night that our flag was still there.” It mattered because it meant the fort had not been taken. Accept any answer that names the flag still flying with words from the verse.

Teaching note: Teach the songs as history. Singing is optional; reading the words is enough. Verse 1 is printed from Key’s 1814 poem; the later verses are not used. Alabama’s state song is named only. Use the observation checklist below for the interview. If a family’s story or song is sacred to them, let them share only what they choose.

Hands-on task observation checklist (Interview a family member about a story or song). Check each item you observe. Four or five items shows the child met the task goal; two or three means repeat the task with support.

• ☐ Child asked for a story or song the person learned when young.
• ☐ Child asked who taught it and where.
• ☐ Child asked whether it really happened.
• ☐ Child recorded the answers in the table.
• ☐ Child named the kind of story or song and gave a reason.

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Day 85: Independent Check: Legends, Stories and Songs

Standard: SS24.2.15

Practice record: Legends, stories and songs from this week, printed on the Week 17 Practice Workbook.

Worked example: Is a story passed down by telling it out loud called oral tradition or a news report? Worked answer: Oral tradition.

1. Johnny Appleseed (John Chapman).
2. Any one of: Washington cut a cherry tree and said he could not tell a lie; Johnny Appleseed scattered seeds everywhere just for fun; John Henry beat the steam drill.
3. Example: In the Cherokee story, Terrapin beats boastful Rabbit in a race by hiding his look-alike relatives on the ridges. People tell it to teach not to brag. Accept a correct summary with a reason it is still told or sung.

Teaching note: Independent check: read aloud if needed, but give no hints.

Sources

George Washington’s Mount Vernon, Cherry Tree Myth (first printed in the 1806 fifth edition of Mason Locke Weems’s Life of Washington; no evidence it happened) | National Park Service, George Washington and the Cherry Tree (Weems’s book first published in 1800; the story added in the fifth edition, 1806) | Britannica, Johnny Appleseed (John Chapman, born September 26, 1774, Leominster, Massachusetts; died 1845 near Fort Wayne, Indiana; a professional nurseryman who sold seedlings) | James Mooney, Myths of the Cherokee, Nineteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology (1900), story 20, How the Terrapin Beat the Rabbit; collected among the Cherokee, chiefly 1887 to 1890 (Project Gutenberg text) | Poarch Band of Creek Indians, official site (Alabama’s only federally recognized tribe, recognized in 1984) | Encyclopedia of Alabama, Poarch Band of Creek Indians (near Atmore, Escambia County) | Britannica, African American folktale (oral tradition brought from Africa; the African hare trickster became Brer Rabbit; first written down in the late 1800s) | Documenting the American South, University of North Carolina, Joel Chandler Harris summary (most of the tales recreated from African fables carried by enslaved storytellers) | Historical Marker Database, John Henry, Legendary ‘Steel Drivin’ Man,’ Leeds, Alabama (tradition places the contest near Dunnavant, September 20, 1887; other states also claim John Henry) | Alabama Folklife Association, Tributaries 11: Preserving the Legend of John Henry in Leeds, Alabama | Library of Congress, Lyrical Legacy: Yankee Doodle (via Digital History, University of Houston; British troops played it marching to battle on the first day of the Revolutionary War; verse 1 from an 1800s Charles Magnus song sheet) | Library of Congress Law Library, Whose Broad Stripes and Bright Stars (Key’s poem written after the bombardment of Fort McHenry, September 13 to 14, 1814; made the national anthem by law in 1931) | Smithsonian, The Star-Spangled Banner: The Flag that Inspired the National Anthem

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