Traveller Education
Traveller Stories
'Once upon a night Stephanie and Stacey woke up and heard footsteps around their grandfather's old painted wagon. They looked out of the trailer window and saw nothing. The wagon was gone ...'
This is the opening paragraph of a story written and made into a laminated and spiral-bound book for the school library by two Year 5 Traveller pupils at Kingsholm C of E Primary School. The girls illustrated it by acting out the scenes with their friends at their Travellers' site and taking photos. Several copies are available for loan in the library and are very popular with non-Traveller as well as Traveller children.
The Traveller pupils in the school have long had a tradition of writing books about their way of life, but it was only recently that they noticed that there are very few works of fiction on the library shelves with Traveller-related settings and characters. Their solution has been to write their own works of fiction, with titles such as 'Chuckle Chuckles' (a fairground story about a ghost train), 'The Lost Wagon' and 'Drama at the Wedding'.
At Rodmarton Primary School, the Traveller pupils have been doing the same. Here is an extract from one pupil's story, "The Magic Tourer":
'One night Andrea and Ben were asleep in their tourer (small caravan). Then ... it happened!!! The tourer was flying through the air!
Andrea woke Ben up. 'Where are we going?' they asked.
Suddenly the tourer landed with a bump. They looked out of the window. They were in the middle of the rainforest ...'
Mary Jeans
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