Our literacy consultants, along with two national fellows, came and spent a week in Pal to help us get ready to start our literacy program. We had a very busy week but we learned a lot and accomplished a lot. We started by seeing what we could say with the fewest sounds possible in Pal and then wrote a couple short stories. Our first stories contain only 4 letters and mostly are, “The chicken went up. The black chicken went up. The chicken went down. The black chicken went down.” Then we chose our next letter, wrote the lesson for introducing it to the people, and wrote more stories containing all the letters taught up to that point. By 6 letters we didn’t just have to talk about the chicken; ‘dog’ and ‘praying mantis’ were now available to us. And, we could have our subject ‘see’, or ‘shoot’, or ‘cook’ too! We continued adding one sound at a time and writing stories until every sound in the Pal language was introduced. The Pal people helped us by drawing pictures that can go with the stories and we checked every single story with a Pal person to make sure it made sense and sounded natural. All our lessons and stories now make up four books which will be printed and used as our classroom text books.
We hope to see our first class begin in a few months and soon after have Pal people reading and writing their own language for the first time ever!
