Our class recently finished reading Blood on the River by Elisa Carbone. I hope you enjoy reading my response.

This book is about a boy named Samuel Collier who’s parents died and was sent to an orphanage. At the orphanage he was chosen to be one of the few boys to go on the Susan Constant. which would take them to the New World. He became the page of Captain John Smith. They later arrived in James Town and there was much work to be done there. They met the natives and began to trade with them, but one day the natives attacked. One of the boys Samuel lived with named James died in the native’s attack. Samuel later became closer with Richard who was another boy he lived with. After the attack the colonists were able to make  ? with the nearby natives. Their leader was named Chief Powhatan. Then later after they made peace the king of England decided to make Chief Powhatan prince of England. Powhatan wasn’t happy with this. Soon after the crowning Reverend Hunt died, he was the one who helped Samuel open up his heart to others. After that English colonists began to starve and were forced to trade with Chief Powhatan. He was still mad at them. Captain Smith chose Samuel and few other men come to trade with him. On the way to Powhatan’s village they stopped at the Warraskoyack village. There Captain Smith decided to leave Samuel as a messenger to tell the people at James Town if anything happend to him or his men. Samuel learned many things at his stay with the Warraskoyack’s. Richard was dropped off at the same village as Samuel. He told him that Captain Smith sent everyone from James Town to different villages. This was because of food shortages. Captain Smith then left James Town and go back to England because he was injured. He got injured on an effort to make a peace treaty with another village. Since Samuel was the page of Captain Smith, he made him the apprentice of John Laydon who was a carpenter when he left. One day Samuel and John Laydon were sent on a trip to build a new settlement at Point Comfort. When they were leaving, John Laydon’s wife refused go with them with her new baby. This was happening during wintertime, and John Laydon’s wife thought that they would have enough food to last through it. This wasn’t true and Samuel knew it, so he stole her baby so she would come to Point Comfort. When she came to Point Comfort and saw him with the baby she was seething mad. Samuel was punished and put in jail. He was later taken out of  jail because many people at James Town didn’t survive the winter.

Samuel changed a lot through the story. Though his first big change was when Captain Smith was put in chains on the ship. He told Samuel to channel his emotions and this helped him a lot at James Town. One reason was that if he ever got mad he would hear Captain Smith’s voice in his head telling him to calm down. When James died in an attack he knew Richard was good friends with him so he became nicer and friendlier to him.

I think that it would very tough to live in colonial James Town because in one winter they started eating dead bodies. Another reason is that it said that there were animals and their waste all over the place, and you could get diseases from them. It also said that in the audio book we listened to in the library. Also you’d have to work very hard every day. If you were working on something with a gentleman they probably wouldn’t be any help.

I thought that this book was really good. I liked how the author takes you through the whole entire journey of the colonists. I also liked that there were many details, so you wouldn’t ever get confused about anything. A character that I really didn’t like was Master Wingfield. He was very selfish because he had a secret storage full of food and used it when everyone was starving. When they found that he had that he was sent on a ship back to England. I would definitely recommend this book to someone who enjoys reading a good historical fiction book.

In our first unit of social studies we were asked to make a graphic novel on an explorer. It took about 3-4 weeks, but it was definitely worth the final result. I worked in a group with two other people. My group received Christopher Columbus as our explorer to research. The first step was to find our information, so first we all looked for books. For me the most helpful resource was World Book Encyclopedia online. After we found all of our information we wrote it up on a Google Document. We then printed out our information and cut it up into different sections that made sense. Then we glued all the cut up information onto a piece of paper in chronological order. We now had a sense of what the order of our comic would be. The next steps were the most fun and easiest. It was because we used a program called Comic Life where you can make your own comics. I made the comic for the middle part of his life. To me this was the most interesting part of his eventful life. I hope you enjoy my comic! Click here to access the project.