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.

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.

If you know what a Beat Baby® is then you will know how excited we are that Lawrence Educational have made their Christmas Beat Baby Raps and the Snowflake Beat Baby Story available to download in BookShelf, the StoryPhones download store.

If you’ve never come across a Beat Baby® before, they are delightful creatures created by Ros Bayley, the renowned Early Years Consultant and story teller, to help children develop a sense of rhythm, rhyme and steady beat. Beat Baby® is a wonderful creature,  she curls up in a ball and can be woken up by the children’s singing. Ros has written hundreds of raps to accompany Beat Baby activities and children are captivated by Beat Baby and motivated to join in with music and singing sessions.

Christmas Beat Baby® Raps

These raps have been especially written to help celebrate Christmas with Beat Baby. The 16 raps include action raps, raps for dancing to and raps that can be listened to.  There are also raps for counting and a rap to be performed with rhythm sticks.

Buy the Rap Book Too!

Not only can you download the Christmas Beat Baby Raps, but you can now buy the accompanying books for only £4.00 including delivery costs.

Snowflake Beat Baby®

Snowflake Beat Baby lives with a lovely family and she is as white as snow.  She is very happy except for one thing – she has never played in snow and she wishes every winter that she will be able to, and then – one magical night – her dream comes true! Children can listen to her story told by Ros Bayley and join her as she enjoys her incredible adventure on a snowy night.

Order a Snowflake Beat Baby®!

You can now order a Snowflake Beat Baby via our download store. The Snowflake set contains the Snowflake Beat Baby and the MP3 download of the story all for £9.00 including delivery.

More New Raps From Ros Bayley

Over the next few weeks we will be adding more Beat Baby and Rap titles by Ros Bayley, including Monkey Raps, Animal Raps and a set of Sound Walk Raps ideal for supporting Letters and Sounds Phase 1.

Free Resources From Lawrence Educational

If you would like to know more about Beat Babies, steady beat and rhythm and rhyming activites you can visit Lawrence Educational’s website and download free information sheets and article written by Ros Bayley. If you like to do this, then please click here.

Have  a Happy Beat Baby Christmas!

Angela Sterling is a French and German teacher with years of experience when it comes to teaching young children how to learn a new language. Angela set up her company Lingotot to provide an opportunity for young children to learn a new language and runs classes in schools, nurseries and with  families teaching languages  through songs, games and play.

 She has translated well know rhymes and songs into French and has written an accompanying songbook with simple to use instructions for the non specialist teacher. The songs are beautifully recorded at an pace ideally suited for children to listen and sing along to.  

 Angela has written an article especially for StoryPhones in which she shares ideas and tips to encourage language learning. If you would like to read Angela’s article, then please click here.

 For more information about Lingotot then you can visit Angela’s website here.

As committed supporters of the spoken word, StoryPhones is delighted to have the wonderful radio plays by Wireless Theatre Kids available in the BookShelf Download store.

Wireless Theatre Kids is an online audio production company who aim to enhance, stimulate and touch the minds and hearts of children from many diverse cultures and countries using radio drama, stories and comedy. Their goal is to develop a love of theatre and literature within those aged 3 to 15 years through the use of radio drama.

Using traditional tales and new stories, Wireless Theatre Kids produce and record audio plays with  actors, sound effects and music bringing  the story to life. With children’s radio programmes rapidly disappearing, Wireless Theatre Kids are aiming to keep children’s radio drama alive and making it easily accessible in a format today’s children readily understand.

Many of Wireless Theatre Kids audio plays will appeal to older children and there are new and original stories for younger ones too. Your children can listen to traditional tales such as Rumplestiltskin or the Three Little Pigs and new and orginal plays will appeal to older children.

If you would like to know more about Wireless Theatre Kids, and keep up to date with their new plays and live recordings, then you can visit their website here.

Rockford’s Rock Opera is an amazing, award wining ecological musical for children and adults.

Rockford’s Rock Opera is an audio story with an important ecological message, brilliant songs and music and wonderful imagery all wrapped up in a spectacular package of sound, imagination and emotions. It’s quite brilliant!

What’s it about?

Far away in the Sea of Tranquillity is the Island of Infinity, home to the last one of every extinct species.

Infinity has a secret for the world, but Moog, a boy from Battersea in London, and Rockford his dog are the only ones who can deliver its message. Travelling to Infinity, Moog and Rockford get drawn into an adventure in sound that threatens the entire human race.

Who Created Rockford’s Rock Opera?

Husband and wife team, Elaine and Matthew Sweetapple created and produced Rockford’s Rock Opera along with Steve Punt, whose voice features in the musical. If you click here, you can find out all about them.

Listening to Rockford’s Rock Opera

Rockford’s Rock Opera is a musical audio story in three parts. You can download the first part for free, or listen via the website. Parts 2 and 3 are available to buy as a download or CD. If you visit the website store, you will be able to see the full range of stories, songs and videos on offer.

The World’s Favourite On Line StoryGoes App!

Rockford’s Rock Opera (Part One) was launched as an app in January 2010 as a free App and swiftly became the most popular children’s audio book in the App Store. Now, with the launch of Part Two of the story as a paid for App, you can enjoy the next amazing instalment in the musical story which recently won the prestigious iParenting Media Award.

Visiting Rockford’s Rock Opera Website

It is well worth paying a visit to the website. Here you can listen or download the first part of the story for free. You’ll find songs and lyrics, fun activities for children, a schools section and the store.

Rockford’s Rock Opera has now been downloaded or streamed on the web by over 1,000,000 people – in fact, it’s the world’s most popular enhanced audio book.

If you would like to visit the website then please click here

This is definitely something your children will want to listen to, and so will you! It will be a challenge for your children to keep their feet still or their imagination in check!