Resources for Transcontinental Railroad

If you use Houghton Mifflin’s Oh, California! there is a small poem regarding John Henry that is a perfect tie-in to Chapter 7 (which is all about building the transcontinental railroad). If your students are anything like my students, then they will become curious about John Henry. Thankfully, I already have the John Henry Book by Julius Lester  & animated video by Scholastic. However, for those of you who do not have them, there is a nice video on Youtube that has an introduction by James Earl Jones. It’s about 11 minutes long, so it’s broken into two parts. However, since WordPress has stopped allowing the embedding of Youtube videos, I can only provide the links. So, if you’d like to see them, here’s the link: John Henry, part 1, & John Henry, part 2.