telling our tales
London
Hello, I am Rebecca Farmer, the Founder of Telling Our Tales. I am a Montessori
teacher committed to the ‘follow the child’ philosophy, and part of my work is
in Nigeria developing library projects for primary schools. It was there that
the inspiration for Telling Our Tales was born. For our libraries we needed
early literacy books for beginner readers in English. We wanted these books to
reflect the children and the communities they lived in, and be fun, full-colour
and vibrant, just like the children who would be reading them. We needed good
quality levelled readers that would encourage reading for pleasure whilst also
being educational. In every bookstore, the only levelled readers we could find
were Keywords with Peter and Jane and other foreign publications—good books, but
hardly reflective of Nigeria and its people. We wanted books set in Nigeria,
with Nigerian children at the heart of every story, but the books we wanted did
not exist, until now!