TSC News Autumn

Travelers’ School Charity Newsletter Winter 2002

Travellers at Telegraph Hill in Devon have been granted £100 by the TSC to help buy a static caravan for an under-5's nursery school. The caravan costs £200 and would have been scrapped otherwise. Some of the Travellers are taking their NVQ in Childcare and the caravan will be an excellent place for the little ones to gather especially as winter moves in and all those long nights by the fire are to be had! tour

Mathemagic, a lifelong learning skills program has been running a computer bus on 3 traveller sites in York. The workshops have been really successful and all those involved have been inspired by their experiences. It is hoped that in the future Mathemagic and the TSC might be able to access funding from European Social Funds and do some projects together.

The TSC held it's first Computer Training weekend at Townhead in Yorkshire from the 15th - 18th of November. There were 4 students attending all of whom expressed an interest in working on site this winter with the Computer Classroom Project. Hopefully another two-day training session will be held in Wales to highlight any problems with Health and Safety issues etc.

Computer Classroom dates:

16-22 Jan Nuneaton, Herefordshire, Gloucestershire

27 Jan – 5 Feb, Devon, Somerset

10 Feb – 19 Feb, Cornwall

3 – 12 March, Locations to be confirmed

17 – 26 March Locations to be confirmed

Artist Kurt Jackson has donated £600 from the sales of his work to the TSC. Kirt’s watercolour paintings of the Traveller’s scene were for sale at an exhibition in Cornwall.

(Unfortunately this newsletter is in black and white and doesn’t quite capture the richness of these paintings!). Thankyou to Kurt and we hope you have a prosperous new year.

The eviction at Woodside 4th November 2002

The first thing the bailiffs had to deal with was a 14-foot high barricade across the entrance. This slowed them down for a bit. Having removed the barricade and the people on top they preceded toward the plots that still had Travellers on them.

The way they dealt with the travellers was quite an eye-opener. One of the travellers children had crawled under one of the tourers and was refusing to come out; This didn’t stop the bailiffs, who proceeded to lower the tourer’s legs thus lowering the tourer onto the child, who at this point was screaming. Had cameras, and people demanding that the bailiffs stop, not been present then the child would probably have been seriously injured. Representatives of the Travellers School Charity who went to see how the authorities treated the Gypsies were shocked to see such disregard to Health and Safety and wondered how often this sort of eviction happened. Maybe the story of a 3-year-old child being sprayed with CS gas at an eviction 2 years ago are true?

There was no apparent assessment of the children’s needs by the local Authority even though some of the children were at local schools. If you want a blow-by-blow account of the eviction go to:

Http://members.aol.com/pp3office/

Anne Clarke a traveller based in Wales, is writing a spelling book for under 4’s on behalf of the TSC. She is also doing a Maths Mandala Workbook where Maths are interspersed with relaxing Mandalas to colour. It is estimated that this project will cost around £500 for the first print so any donations would be much appreciated

We’ve been brain storming for ideas for fun things to do in winter on site.

With all the packaging that’s around these days you can make a really nice mobile. Using sticks or coat hangers tie lengths of wool to the sticks and cut out shapes from shiny paper or tin foil. The tops from plastic egg boxes are quite good to.

The wood pile can be quite a good source of entertainment; try carving figures out of soft lumps of wood making Trolls, Pixies and Fairies The carvings could be displayed on a shelf, look around outside for some gnarly bits of root to provide a back-drop for your figures.

If Maths is your thing you could count how many pieces of wood get put on the fire in an hour then work out how many bits of wood you need a day.

See what birds are around this time of year compared to in the summer.

To make walking fun try identifying trees and plants when they’re in their dormant stage. Looking at the bark and leaves on the floor will help.

If its raining and you’re finding yourself staring out of the window on site, why not improve your Maths? Add up the numbers on vehicle registration plates and see how many add up to 15.

Write a letter to your relatives or friends.

To help with reading, when reading a story get the kids to read a paragraph or sentence. This helps the kids get into reading without it seeming like a chore.

Try drawing your folks, friends or vehicles on site.

Getting a map and putting pins in it showing such things like where children were born, where they’ve travelled to, visited, where Granny or friends live. Using the map you can locate places of historical interest in the area and find out about local history.

Finally you could brainstorm more ideas of fun things to do in winter and send them to us so we can include them in our ’fun things to do in winter’ database.

Try watching site TV !!!

(Cartoon by Kate Evans)