Telling Our Tales

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!