Texas: Sam Houston

Also known as the man who made Texas a state.

Sam Houston was an interesting man.  He took part in the Texas Revolution, and helped form the country of Texas, but during that whole time his chief aim was to join Texas to the United States.  He governed along those lines, but his policies were overturned by the next president, only for him to be elected again, and resume those policies.

The other thing I find intriguing about him, he was against joining the Confederacy, not because of any great love of freedom or anything like that, but because he didn’t think they could win.  I thought that was an interesting bit of foresight.

We read the Sam Houston (First Biographies) book I found in the library, but there’s also a great book for older kids (3rd grade), also called Sam Houston: Standing Firm (Texas Heroes For Young Readers), that I’ve got for when the kids get a little older.  Oh, and as I did a search I found out my favorite kids biographer has a book as well (not at our library), A Picture Book of Sam Houston (Picture Book Biography).  So, there’s 3 books you could use.

After reading we made an exploding book, and this was the first time I made it successfully.  You take two squares and fold them up and glue them together, the pictures should more or less show you how, but if not this site has a more detailed description.

Then they created 3 sentences and 3 pictures.

This boy’s says: He was a soldier.  He got shot.  He was cool.  (I like the picture of him being shot, he’s bleeding, but he’s smiling.)

This is probably Batman’s, he likes to create in pencil only.

He was a soldier.  He was hurt and surrendered Santanna (words are reversed there).  He teach a school.

This is totally unrelated to this post, but I love the pretend play my kids get into.  Here Princess is the queen, Batman is the knight protecting her, and Superman is the servant.  Why?  Because they’d just found a new hat in the costume closet and thought it was really funny to wear.  So Superman’s running around bringing them stuff he “thinks” they want.

I’m gonna link up to these fun parties: