Events for children
Children are always welcomed at the Museum. We give tours to troops, clubs, classes & families.
Book your tour by contacting Gale Henry at 694-1619.
Scenes from a Christmas Past
Antique Toy display in the Rotunda
Old fashioned postcards & Drake Christmas store in the Champion Hills room
A thought for kids...
In November of 2010, our Henderson County Heritage Museum saluted different ways of communicating in our featured exhibit "Keeping in Touch." To communicate, whether by talking eyeball to eyeball, by listening to someone on the radio, by talking on the telephone, or by writing letters, you have to be able to "talk the same talk."
Do you talk in Spanish, or German, or Cherokee, or English? Can you communicate in more than one language? Do you know what either "hola" or "amigo" means? If you know "hola" means "hello" and "amigo" means "friend" in Spanish, you can talk a tiny bit of the talk you need to communicate with an Hispanic friend.
Perhaps you do not want everyone to understand what you are saying. Perhaps you and your friends even work out special codes in which certain words represent certain ideas that only you and your friends will understand. When I was young, my friends and I discovered "pig Latin." In pig Latin, you remove the first letter from a word, apply it to the end of that same word, and add the "ay" sound. For example, "play" becomes " laypay" and "can" becomes "ancay," so what do you think I'm asking when I say in pig Latin, "Ancayouyayalktayaterlay?"
To communicate effectively by speaking, however, you must be able to talk the talk. Just think back to when you first learned to talk. Those sounds coming out of your delicate little mouth eventually became intelligible words. For most of you, those words would have been words from the English language. For others they might have been Spanish. It would be hard for many of us to wrap our voices around some of the sounds used in the Cherokee language. To preserve his people's thoughts and culture, a Cherokee named Sequoyah developed a syllabary, or what is much like the English alphabet, but symbols, like letters represent syllables instead of single sounds. Sequoyah was considered a half-breed because his father was an English fur trader named Nathanial Gist and his mother Wu- teh was Cherokee, a member of the Paint Clan. Sequoyah's English name was George Gist, but because of the crippling effect of an early hunting accident, he was given the name Sequoyah, which means "pig's foot" in Cherokee.
Even though he was often ridiculed because of his disability, Sequoyah made great contributions to his tribe and its history. He is credited with being the only known individual to create a totally new system of writing. This is how he spelled his name and wrote it in Cherokee: Ssiquoya ????. . Check out the website listed below for a closer look at the amazing Cherokee syllabary that Sequoyah, who was not even literate in another language, developed.
After you visit the Museum to see our "Keeping in Touch"exhibit, explore some of the related websites below, or check out these recommended books at your library, I hope you will be better able to appreciate the value of clear communication and the tremendous power of language.
Related Books
| Ahyoka and the Talking Leaves | by Connie and Peter Roop |
| The Cat's Elbow: and Other Secret Languages | by Alvin Schwartz |
| Communication Inventions: From Hieroglyphics to DVDs (Which Came First) | by Jacqueline A. Ball and Gabriel Kaufman |
| Great World War II Projects You Can Build Yourself | by Sheri Bell-Rehwoldt |
| Hieroglyphs from a to Z: A Rhyming Book With Ancient Egyptian Stencils for Kids | by Peter Der Manuelian |
| Sequoyah : Cherokee Hero | by Joanne Oppenheim |
| Sequoyah: The Cherokee Man Who Gave His People Writing | by James Rumford |
| Top Secret: A Handbook of Codes, Ciphers and Secret Writing | by Paul B. Janeczko |
| Explorer | Gifts of $2500 or more |