Betsy Ross and the Silver Thimble: Ready-to-Read Level 2 (Ready-to-Read Childhood of Famous Americans) Paperback – June 1, 2002

After reading this book we visited the Betsy Ross house in Philadelphia, which our kids really enjoyed. The story does a nice job of introducing young readers to Betsy Ross. It has fun pictures. Highly recommended.

Great book. My daughter used this book for her character parade at school. It was easy to read and had a great story.

Not only is this book uninteresting but the premise is absurd. It paints a story as if inherently Betsy is incapable and settles for the lowly task for sewing. The last page says “sewing turned out to be very important”, which is an absurd statement AND furthering the judgement of it previously not being important. Rather than telling the incredible honor of creating our first flag and the talent it required, plus other professions with sewing, it is misogynist and boring.

I asked my granddaughter, age 7, for her review. She said she "likes it a lot." I wished it hadn't been so definite about what girls and boys could/could not do, but she said she understood that's the way it was in Betsy Ross's time.

I used this book for a Girl Scouts/Brownies Try-it patch on Genealogy. We talked about sewing by hand and using a thimble. This book is just right for a taste of history: Betsy Ross and sewing.

This is a quick read focusing on Betsy Ross's childhood. Young Betsy wants to do carpentry just because one of her brothers tells her she can't. But she's not cut out for the task, nor is that where her passion lies. What she's really good at is embroidery. This is a cute story about being true to yourself. The only problem is, the book doesn't give any indication of how accurate the account is. There is a page at the end that mentions Betsy's accomplishments as an adult, but this is not the resource to use if you are looking for a biography.

The message of this book is for girls to stick to sewing and boys can do carpentry.

This book is a bunch of hooey. We got it in a collection of biographical books for kids we purchased for our little non-fiction lover. So tonight we got it out for the first time. It's stated message is "be true to yourself." It's real message is that carpentry is for boys, and sewing is for girls. Also fails to mention that Betsy Ross probably didn't sew the first American flag and that the version she did design was likely sewn by slave women (per the flag's display in the National American History Museum). So tonight's bedtime lesson was don't trust the history books, dear girl.