It was with great sadness that I heard this week of the death of Ros Bayley. Ros was an inspiring Early Years specialist and the most wonderful story teller. Her training courses and workshops were brilliant and packed with practical ideas. I was lucky enough to attend her Steady Beat and Story Telling training sessions, and used Ros’s Beat Baby resources throughout my time as a teacher. So many of my young children benefitted from this. I often turned to her book ‘Foundations of Literacy’, which she co wrote with Sue Palmer, when looking for guidance with my teaching.

When I left full time teaching to focus on StoryPhones I actually had the priviledge of meeting Ros. She was so supportive of our activities and she always came to say hello if we were exhibiting at an event. You could always tell when Ros was leading a session because of the laughter - she was a fabulous storyteller whether it was for children or adults. It is so sad that there will be no more stories.

Ros has always been a great influence on my teaching and I am proud to be able to say that I also knew her a little. Our sympathy goes out to her family and close friends, she will be greatly missed by them and by so many of us in the teaching profession.

Eleanor Johnson

We are now holding StoryPhones training days. These are practical, hands on sessions covering all aspects of StoryPhones including lots of tips and ideas for creative ways of using your StoryPhones audio system to support your children’s learning. The sessions are held in a relaxed, informal way with plenty of opportunities to ask questions and join in.

Our first training session held on Thursday 24th May, was completely booked up. Practitions from a wide variety of settings including nurseries, primary schools and special schools came along to the session. We followed a full programme over the three hours and everyone went away fired with enthusiasm and brimming with ideas.

Here are a few comments from our attendees.

“Excellent training, thank you”

“Clear explaination of how to use the system, lots of  ideas for resources to use. Excellent”

“Very clear, friendly and informative”

When’s the next training day?

We have two training sessions running over the next few weeks:

Thursday 31st May 12.45 – 3.45, Annfield Plain, Co Durham, DH9 7XN - limited places

Tuesday 12th June 1.00 – 4.00, South Leeds CLC, Beeston, LS11 5TT – spaces available

If you would like to attend one of our training sessions, please contact Hilary Jaques on 01207 524877 or email hilary@ameeca.co.uk

Keep in touch about our training days!

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Bug Club is the brilliant new, award winning whole school reading programme from Pearson Education. Bug Club connects printed books with online ebooks so that children can read the printed book then log onto the school Bug Club site and read the books online, at school or at home. The banded books come in various formats and sizes covering different genres such as fiction, non fiction and comics. Many of the stories are based on popular characters from fiction and TV such as Ben 10 and Angelina Ballerina, which will be very appealing to children.

The ebooks have accompanying audio tracks and StoryPhones have been working in collaboration with Pearson to make these audio tracks available as stand alone MP3 audio stories via the BookShelf download store. We have  thoroughly enjoyed working with all the wonderful people at Pearson Education to make these titles available to our StoryPhones customers. These MP3 audio titles from The Bug Club reading programme are currently only available from the StoryPhones download store.

Now Available in the BookShelf Download Store

Bug Club Readers are available in sets (number of titles may vary), or as individual titles. Prices include a site license for use through out your school. Download our BookShelf Resources catalogue for more information.

You can list to a clip of Pete’s Peculiar Pet Shop The Very Smelly Dragon here.