10 Wonderful New Audio Stories From Little Tiger Press

Little Tiger Press is an imprint of Magi Publications, a creatively led, independent company publishing award-winning, best-selling children’s books. They focus is on contemporary and innovative picture books. These are warm, bright, bold and appealing reads that are fun for children and for adults.

Who hasn’t munched along with the Crunching Munching Caterpillar or said ‘Urgh’ at Dirty Bertie’s disgusting habits?  All of the audio stories containg two versions of the story. A listen along version of the story with delightful sound effects and musical accompaniment, and a read along version with page turns. Dirty Bertie, Incy Wincy Spider and Snuggle Up, Little Ones are all accompanied by humorous songs.

StoryPhones are delighted that all of these audio stories are now available in the BookShelf download store.

Congratulations to our latest prize draw winners.

The Village Childcare Nursery in Worcester won our Education Show prize draw. The nursery told us “We are delighted to know we have won a Little Listener and can’t wait for it’s arrival”

Reed First School in Hertfordshire won our prize draw at the Hertfordshire ICT Festival and have received their yellow Little Listener.

We hope all the children have fun using their Little Listeners.

TES  Education 2011 8th and 9th April

We are off on the road again, this time to Manchester for the TES Education Show 2011 at Manchester Central. After our success at Birmingham with our new demonstration area and displays, we are looking forward to bringing these to Manchester. Come along to Stand A15 and we can demonstrate the latest version of our software and talk with you about  the different ways of using StoryPhones.

It would be lovely to see you because …

- we are a small, very friendly company and love chatting to people

- you can see the latest version of our software, we’ve made it even easier for you and your children to use and you can import audio resources in even more different audio formats

- we have even more audio stories, songs and games in our download store

- you can see our latest product, The Little Listener in six brilliant colours

- you can take advantage of our show discounts and prize draw

- we also have seats to rest your weary feet

We will look forward to seeing you there.

We are always pleased to hear how childen are benefitting from using their StoryPhones systems. Durning the past year children across the world have also had the opportunity to gain from our innovative MP3 audio systems. We wanted to share a comment that has just arrived from one particular school in Australia.

“We have loved using this resource. The benefits over a traditional listening post is the lack of all the wires. The students are able to get on task quicker and pack up quicker since they don’t have to detangle wires etc. From a teachers point of view it is quite easy to put the files on and off the devices. I can see benefits using these over iPods due to the ease of transferring files. It is also a benefit to be able to put different content on the different StoryPhones. All in all they are a great product.”  Thank you to Hambledon State School, Queensland, Australia for this comment.

Last week we were at the Education Show. We always enjoy this exhibition and everyone is so friendly. It also gives us a chance to meet our customers and to find out how they and their children are using their StoryPhones systems. Thank you to Westgarth Primary School in Redcar who said ‘StoryPhones was a brilliant invention and took all of the stress away from children having to use buttons to control equipment’.

We also met Lisa from World’s End Infant and Nursery School. Lisa’s enthusiasm for StoryPhones was infectious and we could have chatted all day. Lisa has been using her StoryPhones in the creative area. Her children have been listening to Jack and the Beanstalk and making clay beanstalks as they listen. A brilliant idea.

In fact we have a big thank you to all of our customers for their wonderful feedback. It was a great pleasure to meet everyone and to hear how children are benefitting from using StoryPhones.

Demonstration Area

This year we were able to create different areas of learning to demonstrate how our StoryPhones systems are being used in schools and nurseries. We also set up a demonstration area and we able to deliver mini training sessions.

Colourful Little Listeners

We also launched the full colour range of Little Listeners. You can now purchase them in six vibrant colours. Everyone had a favourite colour!

 The Little Listener is our loudspeaking, recording MP3 play, ideal for listening out loud and recording your children’s stories and ideas. The rechargable battery let’s you and your children take listening any where you want, indoors or outside.

You can now choose from six vibrant colours – red, blue, green, yellow, purple  and orange.

Everyone here at StoryPhones has their favourite colour, which one will be yours? If you would like to find out about all of the Little Listener’s features, you can visit our website by clicking here.

Thursday 17th March is St Patrick’s Day. You can download a free story about St Patrick’s Day from Storynory. Your children can find out about St Patrick and some of the legends associated with his life. If you would like to download this story, then you can click here.

It is well worth a visit to Storynory’s website, not just for St Patrick’s Day. The website packed with a huge variety of stories such as traditional tales, myths and legends and stories from around the world.  There are  stories for children of all ages and  interests and all of these audio stories can be downloaded for free. A brilliant resource and worth bookmarking!

Last week we were exhibiting at the Edinburgh Early Years conference. I always go to these events with my teacher’s hat on too and was lucky enough to be invited along to one of the workshops by Jacquie Cantwell and Louise Caldwell. Jacquie is an Early Years officer and PEEP trainer and Louise is a Play Development officer for the Scottish based NHS iniative, Play @ Home. Both initiatives aim to support and involve parents and carers in their child’s development and learning. 

Jacquie and Louise talked about PEEP and Play @ Home and how these iniatives were  being used to encourage parents and carers to become involved in their children’s play and learning through fun, often using simple activities and everyday objects . One of the ideas they had used very successfully with their groups were Story Sticks. They pointed out that the adults had to help the children to find objects and tie them on to the sticks and couldn’t help being involved. One parent had told them that she and her daughter had used the stick later to retell the story at home.

Our Story Sticks were based on ‘The Bear Hunt’. Jacquie and Louise had collected sticks and put out lots of different materials and objects around the room. We had to go and find them and attach them to our sticks in the correct story sequence. Once we had finished, we came back as a group and retold the story. We all had great fun making our story sticks and the silly noises to go with the story. My story stick is pictured here, I’ll leave you to guess what objects represent the different parts of the story!

It was a lovely idea, and, as Jacquie and Louise explained, the story sticks could be used for such things as a walk, a treasure hunt, a pet or an important person in a child’s life. However the important message was that the adults could be involved, it used low cost, everyday or found objects and eveyone could tell their story afterwards and have a wonderful visual memory of the activity.

If you would like to find out more about PEEP (Peers Early Education Partnership) then you can go to the PEEP website  to find out more.