Sticky Kids new ablbum is now available to all schools and nurseries using StoryPhones MP3 players as an MP3 download in our BookShelf download store.

With the Olympics fast approaching, a simple easy way to involve your children with the excitement is to use this brilliant new album from Sticky Kids.

The Sticky Kids team have produced 16 great new songs that you will be able to use with your children time after time – not just for the Year of the Olympics - but year after year of fun and fitness. The songs include:

- Action songs for warming up, co-ordination, co-operation, control, balance and cooling down.

- Circle songs and songs on the spot.

- Imaginative and cumulative songs.

- Hand apparatus songs.

Sticky Kids music is used by schools and nurseries throughout the country and children love joining in with their catchy songs. Upload their songs on to your StoryPhones Headsets or put the songs on your loud speaking MP3 players and take the music outside!

Download the album for £13.99, this includes all songs and song sheets and a site licence for your whole school or nursery.

Jolly Songs and Spoken Guide are now available from the BookShelf download store!

The synthetic phonics programme produced by Jolly Learning is established world wide as an highly effective way of teaching children the 42 letter sounds of English. Jolly Phonics is a multi sensory approach to teaching phonics in a fun, child centred way using actions and stories to reinforce children’s learning of phonemes and graphemes.

We are delighted that all schools and nurseries who are using StoryPhones MP3 audio systems and Little Listeners are now able purchase the Jolly Songs and Spoken Guide in MP3 format from our BookShelf download store.

Jolly Songs are a fun, interactive way of supporting children’s learning through songs and familiar tunes. Each letter sound has a short song sung to a well known tune.  Within each song the letter sound is sung, making it fun and easy for children remember the letter sounds. If you would like to listen to one of the Jolly Songs then please click here  Jolly Songs Preview

The Spoken Guide speaks out each of the letter sounds in Jolly Phonics. Each letter sound includes the sound several times and a representative word, for example, “s, s, snake, s, s, s”.  It is particularly useful for children who have difficulty articulating some of the letter sounds, for instance, if English is not their first language. If you would like to listen then please click  here Spoken Guide Preview

National Storytelling week is starting on Saturday 28th January. Listening to and telling stories is one of the most ancient ways of communicating and we all still do this today even in our modern 21st Century world. How many times have our children arrived at school or nursery desperate to tell you their story about their trip to the park, or their birthday party. We can be story tellers too, whether you are retelling a traditional tale or creating one of your own, the magic of listening draws children into the story and feeds their imagination. Storytelling is painting pictures with words.

If you are taking part in National Storytelling Week, you may like to record the stories your children tell so they can listen back to them and share them with their friends. If your are planning a story telling session, the National Storytelling Society have lots of ideas to help you. Their website has a list of activties and ideas and includes information about events taking place around the country. You can find out more at http://www.sfs.org.uk/nsw

To celebrate National Storytelling Week, you can download a free audio story of the Lambton Worm, a traditional tale from the North East of England. This story is available from the StoryPhones website.

Going Live on BETT Radio!

BETT 2012 was a busy, buzzy event. Apart from all of the exhibitors showing their latest technologies and resources there were lots of other activites also taking place including BETT Radio.

A wonderful advocate of radio in schools, Russell Prue has been broadcasting BETT Radio shows for the last few months, interviewing everyone involved in the world of educational ICT. Russell also broadcast BETT Radio live throughout the whole four days of the exhibition, using his Anderton Tiger Desktop. I had the excitement of being interviewed by Russell, live on BETT Radio on the Saturday morning. Radio is a wonderful medium for children and young people to use. For many children and young people, writing is a barrier to expressing their ideas and points of view. Radio removes this barrier and many children find their voice and are motivated to use language creatively via the spoken word. Russell’s enthusiasm for radio is boundless and his Anderton Tiger Desktop, portable school radio is really easy to use and the cheapest solution available for use in schools. If you’d like to know more about using radio equipment in your school, then visit Russell’s website at http://www.andertontiger.com/Desktop/. Watch out also for my blog about children’s radio programmes and where to find them.

We were very grateful not to be travelling in snow this year, as we headed down to London for our fourth visit to BETT. The show this year was probably one of the busiest we have ever attended and we were able to meet lots of new visitors to our stand as well as welcoming back old friends.

It was a pleasure to meet teachers and staff and hear all about the different ways they are using StoryPhones including… Washwood Primary who make photo books and record the audio track to accompany them. Warren Mead Infants school use their StoryPhones for guided reading sessions and the British Council school in Madrid have eighteen StoryPhones systems in their school and use them to support their children’s English language learning.

We met a great number of International visitors from countries such as Sweden, Belgium, Denmark, Norway, Brazil, Australia, Singapore, Israel, France, Spain. BETT 2012 was a truely international event. None of them had seen anything like StoryPhones before and we had great fun demonstrating our MP3 systems.

We were able to set up a mini classroom area and were really pleased to be able to use a wonderful piece of role play equipment provided by Rokka Play. We met the lovely people at Rokka Play last year and I was immediately attracted to their Rokka and Cornish Fishing boat. This is such a versitile toy, it can be a rocker, a table or a fishing boat. You can also buy extra pieces of kit to convert it to a kitchen or puppet theatre. I blogged about it last year and now I’ve had a chance to have a hands on experience, I still love it and think it would be a popular addition to any setting. The Rokka allowed us to demonstrate how to integrate audio into a role play area. We uploaded a story based around the sea and environmental sounds from the seaside onto a Headset. If you would like to find out more about Rokka, their website is http://www.rokkaplay.com/

Annoucing new titles in the BookShelf Download Store

Jolly Phonics for Jolly Listening!

BETT was a fantastic opportunity to announce the latest additon to our download store. There are now have over 630 titles in our download store, well over 3000 individual tracks and growning by the minute. We were particularly delighted to tell everyone that the Jolly Songs are now available to download. Jolly Phonics is an International established synthetic phonics programme used through out the UK in many schools to teach children how to read. You can now download the Jolly Songs and Spoken Guide from the BookShelf download store.

New Year’s Resolutions

Help your children start the New Year in a happy, healthy way. Teaching young children the value and importance of healthy eating and good hygiene is a high priority for early years practitioners. We can constantly remind children to do this, however an easy way for children to remember by themselves is to teach these good habits with songs.

Melody Treehouse has created an award winning set of beautiful songs created especially to help young children learn about healthy eating, exercise, personal hygiene and outdoor play. The education team have helped create these catchy, lively songs with a strong educational message – children can have fun and learn important life skills at the same time. The songs cover good habits not often addressed in songs such visits to the bathroom, hair washing and runny noses!

All the songs are easy to join in with and it’s hard not to tap your toes or clap your hands in time to the beat. Happy Healthy Songs recently received a Practical Pre School Bronze Award. A review in the Practical Pre School Magazine said ‘I would recommend this for everyone, it’s a valuable resource for anyone who wishes to teach young children about personal hygiene, healthy eating and exercise.’ If you would like to read the full review, then please click here.

Happy Healthy Songs from Melody Treehouse are now available in the StoryPhones download store. You can purchase and download the whole set of songs including the song lyrics with a couple of clicks in our store.

Watch the video

Melody Treehouse also have a lovely video featuring Melody the Dancing Bear, if your children would like to dance along with her, then please click here.

Happy, healthy singing and dancing!

We are exhibiting at BETT 2012 on stand V35. BETT is always a lively, exciting experience and if you’ve never visited before, wear a comfortable pair of shoes, there’s a lot to see and find out about.

BETT is not only the place to find out about new educational technologies and products, there is a wide range of seminars and talks available. These provide a great opportunity for you to find out about new teaching ideas.

We are attending BETT for the fourth time and are bring StoryPhones, our award winning, innovative digital MP3 audio systems to demonstrate and talk about. We have now had our mp3 players in schools for three years and are delighted with their proven robustness and with the way their use is impacting on children’s learning and allowing teachers across the UK to change the way they use audio resources to support children’s learning. We will be creating a listening classroom with a demonstration area, so please do visit our stand to find out how you can integrate StoryPhones into your setting.

Find out about our latest  StoryPhones Software

Our software has always been child friendly and easy for adults to use. We have now added lots of new features including ones designed to make the children’s page even easier to use. If you’d like to know more then, call into our stand, V35 where we will be revealing all to our visitors.

BookShelf Download Store

StoryPhones provides the only MP3 players with exclusive access to a download store. Many of our downloads are only available from our store. We have been very busy over the last year adding to our titles and now have a wonderful range of audio stories, songs, music and curriculum resources. We have added new titles from Egmont, Lawrence Education, Lingo tot and Languagenut.

New for 2012

We will be announcing details of some fabulous new audio resouces from two leading educational publishers. If you would like to know who they are, then visit our stand at BETT to find out more!

Introducing children to a new language in a fun, lively way through songs and music will sow the seeds for future language learning.

Languagenut have developed a whole series of songs and games designed to introduce children to new languages and all of these resources are available through their wonderfully vibrant website. Languagenut have songs and games available for a wide range of languages including German, French, Spanish, Italian, Japanese and more.

StoryPhones is now able to provide Languagenut’s French songs as MP3 downloads. You can purchase these either as sets, or as individual songs. The songs have all be composed especially for Languagenut, they’re beautifully recorded and simple and easy to learn. Once your children are familiar with the songs, you can use the accompanying instrumental tracks to sing along to by yourselves. You can sing along out loud using the Remote Console or Little Listener, or load the songs onto the Headsets. Don’t be surprised to hear lots of little voices singing along in French.

The songs introduce children to the vocabulary of everyday life including school, sport, food and the weather.

If you would like to know more about Languagenut’s wonderful songs and games then you can visit their website here.

Springland Nursery in Colchester ordered a StoryPhones system as part of the Every Child a Talker Project (ECAT). We asked Team Leader and ECAT coordinator for the nursery, Sarah Duffield, if she would tell us how the children reacted when their StoryPhones system arrived at the nursery. This is what Sarah said:

“Springlands Nursery is new to using StoryPhones. We were given ours through the ECAT project and I as the ECAT co-coordinator was very excited to receive a new piece of equipment. The children were very interested to discover what the box contained and there was lots of smiles and excitement as the contents were revealed. The children eagerly tried on the Headsets and started to walk around wearing them finding out what they could do with them.  We as a Nursery have many ideas for developing the ways we use StoryPhones and look forward to many years of our children benefiting from this valuable resource.”

Springlands Nursery and has twice been judged outstanding by Ofsted. They have also developed a software package for assessment, planning and recording called Easysolution 4 Nursery Education. If you would like to find out more about this, then please click here.

We are looking forward to hearing all about the different ways the staff and children at Springlands Nursery are using their StoryPhones system.

If you know what a Beat Baby® is then you will know how excited we are that Lawrence Educational have made their Christmas Beat Baby Raps and the Snowflake Beat Baby Story available to download in BookShelf, the StoryPhones download store.

If you’ve never come across a Beat Baby® before, they are delightful creatures created by Ros Bayley, the renowned Early Years Consultant and story teller, to help children develop a sense of rhythm, rhyme and steady beat. Beat Baby® is a wonderful creature,  she curls up in a ball and can be woken up by the children’s singing. Ros has written hundreds of raps to accompany Beat Baby activities and children are captivated by Beat Baby and motivated to join in with music and singing sessions.

Christmas Beat Baby® Raps

These raps have been especially written to help celebrate Christmas with Beat Baby. The 16 raps include action raps, raps for dancing to and raps that can be listened to.  There are also raps for counting and a rap to be performed with rhythm sticks.

Buy the Rap Book Too!

Not only can you download the Christmas Beat Baby Raps, but you can now buy the accompanying books for only £4.00 including delivery costs.

Snowflake Beat Baby®

Snowflake Beat Baby lives with a lovely family and she is as white as snow.  She is very happy except for one thing – she has never played in snow and she wishes every winter that she will be able to, and then – one magical night – her dream comes true! Children can listen to her story told by Ros Bayley and join her as she enjoys her incredible adventure on a snowy night.

Order a Snowflake Beat Baby®!

You can now order a Snowflake Beat Baby via our download store. The Snowflake set contains the Snowflake Beat Baby and the MP3 download of the story all for £9.00 including delivery.

More New Raps From Ros Bayley

Over the next few weeks we will be adding more Beat Baby and Rap titles by Ros Bayley, including Monkey Raps, Animal Raps and a set of Sound Walk Raps ideal for supporting Letters and Sounds Phase 1.

Free Resources From Lawrence Educational

If you would like to know more about Beat Babies, steady beat and rhythm and rhyming activites you can visit Lawrence Educational’s website and download free information sheets and article written by Ros Bayley. If you like to do this, then please click here.

Have  a Happy Beat Baby Christmas!