Sod Houses on the Great Plains [Hardcover]

Glen Rounds (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 1995 | Age Level: 4 and up

How sod houses were built and lived in.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

From School Library Journal

Kindergarten-Grade 3-Though delightfully simple, this pictorial history has very complete information on the sod houses built in what is now Kansas, Nebraska, and the Dakotas during the later part of the 19th century. Rounds's tongue-in-cheek sense of humor shows through in both his telling of the facts and his clever illustrations. Careful readers will discover that every picture tells many things about early frontier life not mentioned in the text. These are typical Rounds illustrations, done in crayon with ink outlines. Their simplicity, and the primitive, soft, dusky, spare, earthy style is perfect for this subject. The artist has also made excellent use of the whole double-spread space. He leaves lots of the page open and blank, adding to the accurate feeling of the open space of the plains. The colors are subdued and a little dirty-looking-perfect for this time period. Ann Turner's Dakota Dugout (Macmillan, 1985) is another excellent title on this topic. Written in a fictional style, it has a little more feeling but imparts less information. Rounds's title is an important contribution to books on American history for young children.
Susannah Price, Boise Public Library, ID
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Ages 5-8. Log cabins may be symbolic of frontier America, but for the pioneers who settled on the nearly treeless prairies, home was more likely to be a sod house or a dugout. Born in a sod house in South Dakota in the early 1900s, Rounds not only shows his audience what these earthen houses looked like and how they were built, but he also tells what they were like as homes: crowded, dark, damp, puddled after rainstorms, safe from wildfires, and prone to visits from "uninvited wildlife." Even children who soon forget the details of sod house construction will remember the illustration of a snake dropping through the dirt ceiling to startle a settler in the room below. From the tilt of a head to the pointing of a finger, a nuance of line defines Rounds' signature style of drawing: strong, craggy, and idiosyncratic. Adding color with restraint, he makes good use of white space to suggest the openness of the prairies. Similar in subject to his book for older children The Treeless Plain (1967), this picture book will brighten any classroom unit on the pioneers of the Great Plains. Carolyn Phelan

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Reading level: Ages 4 and up
  
• Hardcover: 1 pages
• Publisher: Holiday House; 1st edition (March 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0823411621
• ISBN-13: 978-0823411627
• Product Dimensions: 10.3 x 9.3 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,244,786 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A clear picture of life on the Plains, July 14, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Sod Houses on the Great Plains (Hardcover)

This book will hold the interest of adults and children alike. Teachers and homeschool parents especially need to include it in a unit on the West. Mr. Rounds gives us a clear idea of what life in a sod house was really like: cramped quarters, leaky roofs, and uninvited wildlife falling through the roof. The illustrations in subdued pastels are almost childlike in their simplicity and very effectively visualize the text. I highly recommend it.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars My 2nd Grader LOVED it!, January 11, 2011

By 

XNC "XNC" (Over Here) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Sod Houses on the Great Plains (Hardcover)

This is a children's book and should be rated as such. My son LOVED it! Informative and engaging!

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Sod Houses on the Great Plains, November 20, 2007

By 

Sherry Halvorson "Sherry Lee" (Midwest) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Sod Houses on the Great Plains (Paperback)

A huge disappointment. First-grade level. This should be rated as a child's illustration. If you want detail don't buy this. Informtion is skimpy and incomplete.