Casey Jones unit

Hi! Future Ticia 2024 here, I’m updating this post and combining it with an older Casey Jones unit we did when the kids were in Kindergarten. The old unit was a lot of fun, but the post is old, the pictures are terrible, and rewriting the post gave me a great excuse to watch the Casey Jones cartoon again. This was a fun book and activity, but it’s also a history lesson because Casey Jones is a real person from American history.

Casey Jones unit supplies

We used a couple of books and a video, and these are affiliate links.

Casey Jones, American Legends (Casey Jones is also on Youtube), Casey Jones’s Fireman, I Dream of Trains

Extending this to learn about the person

As Future Ticia 2024 is updating this post, I figured I should include some more about the actual person. I found some interesting things. I guess it makes sense that someone from the past might be controversial.

I also discovered there is a Grateful Dead song called Casey Jones.

This first video has one swear in it right at the beginning, so if you skip the first 20 seconds you should be find.

And this is where I found out he’s controversial. Casey Jones, Union Scab. Not quite the person to inspire cartoons… This is an old song, so I don’t know exactly what inspired it.

Okay, this one is a short documentary, about 15 minutes, and I didn’t watch all of it. I also have to admit I have realized there is an entire rabbit hole that I am forcing myself not to go down as I found so much material to look up just on YouTube.

Really, look him up, and this could be a great research topic for an older kid.

Casey Jones Unit

Much like last time our Casey Jones unit was both reading the books and watching the movie.  This time I’ve added in a few other bits (hey my kids are older now).  So, there’s more writing and a bit more thinking.

Again we compare the Casey Jones book to the movie, and I still love that movie, it makes me laugh.  It made me even happier when I found out the vocalist is the same person who did the March Hare in Alice in Wonderland.

Future Ticia 2024 says, that really does make so much sense, and I’m amazed I didn’t catch it earlier.

But, we added in reading “Casey Jones’s Fireman,” and I think I like this book even more than the first book we read.  I love books with a touch of the fantastic, and it reminded me of a book we read for our Virginia studies, Sparks Fly High, and another one for Arkansas, Rosie’s Fiddle.  All three of these books feature a character being tempted by a devil figure.  These types of stories were wildly popular in the mid-1800s, and pop up every now and then in stories still.  I find them fascinating.

Well, for this book I thought it’d be fun to add a fantastical element to a story that happened to us.  I’m quite eager to see how their stories turn out on this one.  I’ll try to post the update when it happens.

And my final book I added in this time?

“I Dream of Trains,” it’s a great story about a boy who dreams of a better future because of Casey Jones and Sim Webb.  Sim Webb gave a lot of young black men hope for a better future.  Here was an Irish engineer treating Sim as an equal in a day when that didn’t happen.

Well this is a rare post, I’m all out of what I want to say, and I’m under 400 words.  Go figure.

Ha ha ha ha, Future Ticia 2024 says that is no longer true, now let’s head back to our earlier unit.

Preschool Casey Jones Unit

One of the local Tennessee heroes is Casey Jones, he was a train engineer in the 1800s who was known for never being late, and who sacrificed himself but saved everyone else on his train from a crash.

He was originally made famous by a song written a few years after his death and then became famous again when Disney made a cartoon short about him.

For our study we read about Casey Jones {affiliate link}, then we watched the movie.

Afterwards, we compared the book and the movie.  In this instance, we did a simple same and different T-chart, but this is a favorite activity of mine with books that have been made into movies.  What was changed?

In case you can’t read what that says, in both he crashed, but he did not paddle through water in the book.

There were a few significant differences between the book and the movie, and if you’re interested I’d highly recommend the wikipedia article about Casey Jones, it gives some interesting facts.

What is your favorite book-to-movie transition?  Do you like any picture books that have been made into movies?  I have very mixed feelings on those movies.

Future Ticia 2024 laughs at that last sentence since I now have an entire section of Books made into movies on my blog, but I still do think many of those movies are travesties.