Sequoyah

Rumford, J. (2004). Sequoyah. New York, New York: Houghton Mifflin Company.

This book is about a man named Sequoyah who was born in eastern Tennessee in the 1760s. He was the son of a Cherokee woman and a white man. He was a regular man that simply went about his daily duties of metalwork. He did not want his people and their voices to die away and so he wanted to invent a way for his people to be able to write, believing it would make them stronger. He began drawing symbols for each word and putting them on pieces of wood.People thought he was crazy, yet he continued to press on to develop a written language for his people. His daughter eventually learned to read and people started respecting what he was doing. People learned quickly and the Cherokee Nation was able to publish newspapers and books. It is a very interesting book and very well written.

It could be neat for a Language Arts class to think about the gift of language and reading and writing. It could be thought provoking to pose the question what would we do without being able to read and write? What are the benefits of language? What are the hardships? This book does a great job of making one ponder the beauty of language.