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.