{"id":1882,"date":"2023-03-21T15:01:12","date_gmt":"2023-03-21T20:01:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/susie-l\/?p=1882"},"modified":"2026-08-03T07:51:28","modified_gmt":"2026-08-03T12:51:28","slug":"pre-k-to-1st-grade-in-3-weeks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/susie-l\/2023\/03\/21\/pre-k-to-1st-grade-in-3-weeks\/","title":{"rendered":"Pre-K to 1st Grade in 3 weeks"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n
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How do you like the picture above?\u00a0 Does it just make you stand in awe of what God does?\u00a0 No, not yet?\u00a0 Ok, let me share the backstory, and I think that you’ll be excited about it, too.

If you remember, a month ago I shared about a trip I was going to take to Guinea to lead a missionary team and the people they’re working with through their very first Alphabet Party.\u00a0 I was a bit nervous about\u00a0being the expert when I had no idea how it would turn out.\u00a0 Of the 5 Doure guys there, 2 spoke French and had been to school, 2 could write in a language with a completely different alphabet (no a, b, or c) and understood a tiny bit of French, and 1 had taught himself a few A, B, C’s.\u00a0 But God was good, and the Doure people now have an initial alphabet and spelling rules in their language!\u00a0 This picture is the very first word that they wrote with the very first alphabet in their language – k\u0259fe.\u00a0 It means “cold.”\u00a0 It’s perhaps not the most impressive 1st word, but by that day we had taught them how to write all their vowels but only the first 8 or 9 consonants, so there were only a few options.\u00a0 By the next day they each wrote a word of their own (with lots of spelling mistakes), and so, for the first time ever, communicated something to someone else in their language through the written word.\u00a0 And by the next week they were writing simple sentences as well.\u00a0 By the end of the three weeks, at least 3 of them were able to write rather clearly and consistently, so that we were able to understand what the other had written!

In a way, I feel like we went from 0 to 50 in 3 weeks.\u00a0 My mom, a kindergarten teacher by trade, said that it’s like we taught from pre-k into the start\u00a0of 1st grade in 3 weeks, teaching letters and writing and reading and such.\u00a0 When we started we had a lot of help from my co-workers there and from a co-worker who has worked in a very related language for a long time, but we still didn’t know what we’d find or how it would go.\u00a0 So it was like teaching without an answer key, learning from each other and creating the rules\u00a0based on linguistics that we put into practice as we went.

And yet God went above and beyond our expectations, and I’m amazed at how much we were able to get done.\u00a0 Yes, the team still has a lot of work in order to follow up on what we learned and clean up some of the rough edges, but hopefully it was a bit of turbo power and got them over the hump of “how in the world do we make an alphabet?”\u00a0 Would you pray that this alphabet and these spelling rules would be used, one day\u00a0in the not too distant future, to translate the very Word of God into the Doure language?\u00a0 And that these guys and the rest of the people group would be eager to learn to read so that they can read what God has said to them?

Thanks for praying us through!

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How do you like the picture above?\u00a0 Does it just make you stand in awe of what God does?\u00a0 No, not yet?\u00a0 Ok, let me share the backstory, and I think that you’ll be excited about it, too. If you remember, a month ago I shared about a trip I was going to take to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":945,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1882","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-uncategorized","entry"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/susie-l\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1882","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/susie-l\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/susie-l\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/susie-l\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/945"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/susie-l\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1882"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/susie-l\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1882\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/susie-l\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1882"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/susie-l\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1882"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/susie-l\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1882"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}