Texas Revolution - Texas History - Teaching in the Fast Lane

Let’s talk about exciting ways to teach the Texas Revolution era of Texas History!

A blog post full of notebook pictures, recommended read alouds, ideas, and tips for teaching the unit.

The Texas Revolution is one of my students’ most favorite units of the year, I think it is only beat out by Texas Symbols, because it has become such legend in Texas culture. Everyone has heard of The Battle of the Alamo and has seen the Come and Take It flag. I think John Steinbeck said it best, when he said that Texas is a state of mind, and we certainly do feel that way.

I like to start the unit by comparing what life was like in Texas prior to the Revolution. We create a quick and easy anchor chart comparing Texas under Spanish rule and then under Mexican rule. We have a little discussion on if things were getting better or worse, and why students think that.

Then we move into the Decree of April 6th. I start with another anchor chart where we list the major point and discuss what it meant for people already living in Texas in addition to people who were trying to come to Texas from the United States.

Students also complete their own fold-up with the information of the Decree of April 6th in their own words. At this point we usually take some time to read up on the war and people involved. I have listed some of my “usual suspects” below at the end of the post.

Next we start the comparisons. It is really important to me that students understand how lopsided the war was. Three big areas that we look at are the leaders of each side, the size of their armies, and the experience that each side brought to battle.

We go a bit further into the details of the leaders of each side of the revolution in addition to the causes and effects of different stages of the war. After we have focused on the people of the revolution my class loves to play this review game.

We also create a map of where the different battles of the Revolution took place. My students are always fascinated with how close we are to so many of the battle sites and I often hear from families later that they were inspired to visit them.

To wrap things up we do some more comparisons between the two sides of the war and end the unit with an anchor chart about the Treaty of Velasco which actually ended the way. My students always love to hear about how Santa Anna was actually captured.