StoryPhones has been able to support a  Comenius Project. Our local school, Lanchester EP Primary, has been planning a project with their partener schools designed to involve all the children from eight different countries throughout Europe. The aim of the project was for the children to learn at least one song and dance from each country and to perform and record these. The children will also be able to find out more about their own culture and the culture of the partner countries and to understand what it means to be European and how their culture and identity fits into the united European community.

StoryPhones offered to donate one of our loud speaking MP3 players to each school and to develop a website where the schools could  upload and download audio files and share their recordings. The new website is password protected, schools and pupils can log in using passwords making it a totally safe environment for children to use. Schools can upload their MP3 tracks, edit them and download MP3 tracks from other schools.

Monday April 11th saw the arrival of teachers and pupils from Holland, Italy, Poland, Turkey, Spain, Portugal and Greece to Lanchester Primary School. A fantastic week of events has been planned by Mrs Davies, the Head teacher and all of her staff. We were delighted to be invited to the school to meet everyone, explain about the new website and how the MP3 players worked. The school had been decorated beautifully and the atmosphere was buzzing, food was being shared, and it left us with a strong sense of different cultures and countries coming together, truely reflecting the aim of the Comenius programme.

The Eurostars project will continue over the next year and we will be following it with interest. We would like to thank Mrs Davies and her colleagues from all the partner schools for making us feel so welcome and for their enthusiasm for the new website.

We have just returned from a busy week of travel.

TES Primary Exhibition

The TES Primary show at Manchester is always a pleasure to attend. The wonderful old railway terminal makes a fantastic venue, Manchester city centre is vibrant and we always meet such frienldy people. Thank you to everyone who visited our stand and for all of your positive feedback about StoryPhones. Our new display attracted a lot of interest. We decided to develope this to demonstrate a few ways that StoryPhones are being used in schools and nurseries around the country.

I was able to take some time away from our stand to wander around the exhibition and saw some very good new resources. I liked:

- Speak Clearly Ltd, resources designed to help and assess children’s spoken language skills.

- Sing Your Times Tables. Children can learn their times tables by singing along with three characters Fizz, Buzz and Wizz to catchy songs. The tunes are easy to learn and there are opportunities to join in with the answers.

Prize Draw

We held a prize draw again at the exhibition, the prize was a Little Listener. Congratulations to the winners, Knypersley First School.

Nottingham Literacy Conference

On Wednesday 6th April we exhibited at the Nottingham Literacy Conference. We had the chance to meet lots of people, the workshops were very interesting and lunch was good too. Alsso at the exhibition was:

The UK Literacy Association

I was delighted to meet Eve Bearne from the UK Literacy Association. UKLA is a charity with the  sole objective of the  advancement of education in literacy. The research and information they produce is invaluable reading for anyone interested in supporting and teaching literacy skills. If you would like more information about the UKLA then please click here to go to their website.

The Naughty Bus

I was able to buy a copy of the ‘Naughty Bus’ by Jan and Jerry Oke. This is a wonderfully humerous, imaginative story about a little red London bus. The photographic illustrations are brilliant, my favourite page is the little red bus in the shower! The story is so easy to follow and I really liked the way the text changed shape and size to reflect  the story. I can’t wait to take it to school to share with the children. My big disappointment was that I didn’t have time to have my book signed by Jan Oke who was attending the conference.

Where next?

We are not travelling very much in May, but June and July are busy again. If you would like to see StoryPhones in action, then please click here to visit our website with details of the exhibitions and conferences we are attending.

We have just returned from the TES Primary Show at Manchester. As usual, I always like to look around to see what resources and ideas are on show. I was pleased to have the opportunity to meet with Naomi Mason, a Speech and Language Therapist who runs her own company called Speak Clearly Ltd.

Naomi has produced a whole series of resources which bridge the gap between Speech and Language Therapy and schools/nurseries. Her teaching resouces give clear, practical guidance about how to enhance speech and language development within a classroom or nursery.  The Speak Clearly resources have hundreds of simple five-minute activities for teachers and their assistants to identify and help children who have Speech and Language difficulties or EAL. All of the resources are presented on a CDrom so the whole school can share them.

I really liked the Speak Clearly resources, the photos were clear and simple, the instructions were easy to follow and I liked the fact that I could use them to make simple assessments of children’s spoken language. These resources are ideal for the non specialist to use.

If you would like to know more about the Speak Clearly games and resources then it is worth visiting Naomi’s website at www.speakclearly.co.uk.