I am a teacher. I love telling, and sharing stories with children.
When my children were little, they attended a Playbus, this was a play project based on a double-decker bus. We had many adventures and lots of fun on the bus. My story books have links to this involvement as well as adventures from my teaching career.
Following the first Jay-Jay story based on the Playbus my daughter suggested I should write about some of the fun things we did with the bus. She remembered how our bus would join in with bus rallies, where lots of different Playbus projects would meet and share ideas.
At one rally we met Sparky the Dragon bus which was a real bus which operated in Glasgow, Scotland. The bus supported children with disabilities and even had a stairlift to enable users to access the top deck of the bus.
The bus was the inspiration for the story of a little girl, who having designed Sparky’s beautiful exterior paintwork, finds she can join in even with her wheelchair disability. The message of Sparky was based on inclusion and now, with the stairlift she can climb to the top deck of the bus and join in.
The patron of the original Playbus project was The Princess Royal, Princess Anne, who once came to visit the bus.