First draft of the Kovol primers and readers

Our team has just reached a significant milestone with the completion of the first draft of our literacy materials 🙂 We spent 2 weeks of focused time working on them with the help of two literacy consultants and we now have 87 lessons that teach all the syllables needed to read in the Kovol language. Some lessons introduce new syllables and some lessons are practice lessons that use syllables that have already been introduced to tell short stories for practice reading.

As the number of syllables available increased through the program, telling good stories became easier and easier. I guess we ended up with around 40 stories. It became a challenge to create new stories as the days went on without repeating ourselves too much. Many of our stories were fictional stories set in a Kovol setting.

We had Semi (a name we had to invent as we were short on syllables!) a young boy who gathered honey from a bee’s nest found in the jungle. Semi ended up being stung by the bees of course! We had Soso going to town for batteries. He returned home and gave batteries to different people and they put them in their torches.
We had stories about hunting wild pigs, planting food and visiting friends.

We were able to throw some morals into stories too. We had one about a lady eating some rotten meat and becoming sick. She came to the missionaries asking for medicine and they responded by saying that they couldn’t give her any medicine for that. We weren’t doctors and it wouldn’t be right to give her medicine because we didn’t know what the right medicine was.
In another story a child was sick and his dad told him to drink a lot of water if he wanted to get better, but the child didn’t listen to his dad and the dad told him off.

Near the end of the books, we had all the syllables for the whole language. I went to a friend of mine and told him to think up a story and I would catch it on a voice recorder and write it down to go in the book. After a little thought, he came up with a story that sounded like this:

A friend was breaking down an old house. He was up on the roof pulling out nails. He pulled one and it came loose really easily and he slipped and fell. He ended up getting caught in the rafters and hanging there. Everyone down below laughed at him. He was tired of working on the roof and was hungry. He went looking for food and saw some bamboo that had prepared food in it. He shook the bamboo to get the food out, but a snake came out instead! He yelled and was lifting his legs up like he was dancing shouting. Everyone laughed. Then he got a machete and killed the snake.

Soso’s story

I think Soso got very used to my coming up with silly stories filled with slapstick humour!

I was able to get a true story in too. A while ago I had asked Kabaluku about humour and what they find funny. He told me a story of how one time he was hiding in a blind shooting birds that came to wash in the water in a hollow of a tree. His friend came along and didn’t notice him hiding in the blind. He reached out and put his hand into the water to check it, also thinking he would build a blind. Kabaluku pushed his arrow forward and speared his friend’s hand. The friend jumped up and cried out. He thought that a spirit had bitten him and he ran away. Kabaluku was laughing hysterically at the story and it was also funny as a written story 🙂

Another way we included the Kovol community was by asking them to illustrate the stories. We handed out sheets of paper and pencils and groups worked at drawing pictures to go with our stories. Have a look at the ones below:

The community ended up drawing 82 illustrations for us.

So that’s Primers 1-4 and readers 1-4 drafted. What’s next? We’ve been given a big list. Checking, rechecking and formatting our primers and readers is one thing. We need to produce and translate a teacher’s manual which is a Kovol language step-by-step guide for teaching these lessons. It’s quite a translation project! We’ll be working with new concepts and new items.

Once the program is ready we’ll want to start teaching. We’re aiming for June for the first Kovol literacy class. We’ll need to figure out who attends the first class, where it will be, what time it will be and what we will provide and not provide. Our instinct is to use our wealth to provide everything free of charge, building a brand-new well-equipped classroom.
The important thing we need to keep in mind though is reproducibility. Will future Kovol literacy teachers be able to replicate what we do in other Kovol villages? We want literacy and the gospel to spread to all of the Kovol villages. So whatever we start here is the model of what the Kovol people will expect going forward. If we build a brand new building with slabbed timber and a corrugated iron roof that we provide free of charge we’ll be on the hook to do that for every classroom hereafter. We’d make ourselves an indispensable part of the equation and literacy will stop if we’re not around.

There are so many good and helpful things we can do, but we really need to not do them. One small example is that we can create worksheets. We can create Kovol-specific rewriting materials. The kinds of things our own children have. Dot to dots, tracing symbols and pencil control activities. That’s something we can do, but if we do we need to print and distribute those worksheets. That is no problem right now, but what about in 10 years time? Imagine we’re not in Kovol right then and they want to start a literacy course for new students, but they can’t because the course says they need pre-writer worksheets.

Our team has a lot to discuss as we figure out the best way to implement the new course.

There is lots to do, but the last 2 weeks have been exciting. The momentum towards taking our roles as literacy and Bible teachers has started. We’ve got to push and stretch to polish and print the material ready for the first class which should be starting soon. We’re advised to push so that the 1st class graduates this year. It is a 6 month course so our literacy and post-literacy programs need to be finished and ready for use in the next months.
Our Kovol friends have been with us every day for the last few weeks. A highlight was a mock lesson we taught on the first pages of Primer 1. We invited some people up to participate and the beaming smiles on their faces as they learned to read and called out sounds they had learned were amazing.