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.

Having created their first successful album ‘Happy Healthy Songs’, Melody Treehouse have now produced a delightful collection of songs to support the exploration of nature and minibeasts through song, movement and dance.

Wildlife Garden Songs are a collection of 15 songs designed to help practitioners teach children about the natural environment and the creatures who inhabit this world.

Once again, Melody Treehouse has created songs on unexpected, but very important themes. We really liked the song about a compost heap, passing on a very important environmental lesson. You can listen to a selection of songs here.

These songs can be used in conjunction with a garden or wildlife project and focus on the importance of the balance of nature. The songs also support other areas of learning including counting, positional words, physical development and PSED.  Melody Treehouse have also included instrumental versions of the songs for sing along sessions.

Songs are an ideal way of supporting children’s learning, and alongside their investigations and exloration you can use these songs to reinforce the names, habitats and movement of all the creatures they will find in the outdoor area. Woven throughout the songs are the use of concepts, number, and positional vocabulary, ideal for supporting the EYFS curriculum and beyond. Because all StoryPhones MP3 players have rechargeable batteries, these lovely songs make an ideal partner with our players.

Hilary James and Simon Mayor have over 20 years experience of writing and performing for children and are two of the UK’s leading songwriters and musicians They have worked as songwriters and musical directors for BBC TV and Radio on well known children’s programmes such as Play School, Playaway and The Song Tree. Simon is also one of the world’s leading mandolin players and composers and Hilary is an accomplished musician and has a voice described by BBC Radio 4 as ‘one Britain’s finest voices’.

Hilary and Simon’s amazing talent and skill have combined to create fine,  humorous songs for children of all ages. These songs are laugh out loud funny, with clever plays on words, story telling and brilliant music.

The songs also support many of the National Curriculum requirements for language and literacy and music and will support any creative curriculum activities.

We are delighted to have Hilary and Simon’s songs in our download store and  all five Musical Mystery Tour Albums and a  collection of gentle lullabies are now available to download. The songs cover a wide range of subjects from Harry the Hungry Horse to King Canute! The albums cost £6.00 each or you can purchase individual songs for 80p each, these prices include a site license for use in the whole of your school or nursery. All you need to do is enter our download store, and click on the ‘music’ or ’songs’ tag on the left hand panel. Why not  listen to  The Parrot Song, Harry the Hiccupping Horse or a gentle lullaby Lavender’s Blue!

We work very closely with our publishers and content providers to make their wide range of wonderful audio resources available to our customers. The Education Show gives us the opportunity to meet up with them and find out about new resources and let them know how schools and nurseries are using StoryPhones to listen to these stories, songs and audio resources. Here’s who we met this year.

Pearson Bug Club

We have the Pearson Rigby Star audio resources in our download store and we are very excited that we now have many titles from the award winning Bug Club Reading Programme available to download. StoryPhones customers have exclusive access to these MP3 audio stories.

Sticky Kids

Sticky Kids have some brilliant songs and they have recently released their latest album ready for the Olympics. Called ‘Go For Gold’, it will inspire your children to run and jump and leap for the Olympics and beyond.

Letterland

Letterland’s really colourful stand attracted lots of visitors and we found out more about their new ‘Fix-It Phonics’ resouces, helping to teach English to children around the world. We really liked Letterland’s award winning Cookbook, you can now eat your way through the alphabet! StoryPhones schools and nurseries can download ABC Stories, Beyond ABC Stories, Handwriting Songs and Alphabet Songs from our download store. You can also order the books to accompany the songs and stories.

Yellow Door

We have lots of resources created by Yellow Door available to download. The ‘Come Alive Stories’ are toe tapping and difficult not to sing along to. We have recently added new titles for the ‘Tune Into …’ series and the ‘Come Alive Phonics’ pack, a lovely, multi sensory way of introducing phonics.

And Finally …

We took our Beat Baby along to the Education Show to join us on our stand. Many  of Ros Bayley’s stories, raps and Beat Baby resources can be downloaded from the download store and Beat Baby always comes along with us.

Beat Baby is a delightful character and supports the resouces Ros Bayley has created to introduce and develop rhythm and steady beat in young children.

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

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.