Here’s what kids are saying about Venture Smith’s Colonial Connecticut!

Piloted in 2018/2019, 7th grade class

Part of learning about people (at least for me) is being able to put myself in to their shoes and understand why they did what they did and how difficult it was for them to do it. … One more amazing thing about your book is that it kept me interested all the way through. … You made it so that I wanted to keep learning about him and learn more.

When reading the book I was amazed at all of the tragedies that happened to him and how he changed and succeeded through it all.

I think that when writing a book for this age group, making the story easy to understand plays a big role. I think that you did this very well and that anyone that is in this age group could understand this and will have a lot more knowledge on this topic after reading this. I appreciate that you made the parts that Venture said in bold and the parts that you wrote in normal text.

It’s really helpful to have an exact copy of Venture’s words. … It’s reassuring that he wrote this himself and that none of it got changed by inferences. I also quite like the fact that you added in additional information in parts 3 and 4 on the different events that took place at that time. … Lastly, I would like to show my appreciation for the brief summaries at the beginning of each chapter. It helped sum up some of the hard stuff and was very helpful.

While reading Venture’s story I was constantly hooked.

You wrote the book in a way that is simple and easy to understand.

With having different topics you can learn more … and know more things. It also doesn’t talk just about Venture … you were saying how other people lived as slaves and that was very cool how you added that.

I also enjoyed how you added many images because it allowed me to make a connection with the text, for example the topological map helped me understand where in our area he had lived. Another thing that helped me understand slavery in Connecticut and other areas were the charts and graphs.

I learned that even in the North where there weren’t huge plantations that the slaves had to work extremely hard or suffer cruel punishments.

I also learned a lot about slavery and was sometimes surprised about some of the things that were not as I thought they were.

One of my favorite parts was chapter 22, when you are showing why Venture’s story is important.

 

For more information, visit VentureSmithColonialCT.org