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!

Once again, Ros Bayley has created a lively set of songs which will appeal to children and adults and guarantee to get those toes tapping. Beautifully composed and sung by Nick Foster, the rhythm, reptition, rhyme and steady beat  are ideal for encouraging and developing children’s language and communication skills.

You can stomp along with dinosaurs, fly into space or bang along with the drums. These songs will have everyone jumping, clapping, stamping and tapping all around the room.

The Wicked Action Songs album is now available as a download in the BookShelf download store.

New Stories From Egmont Publishers

We would like to welcome Plop the Owl, Stripy Horse, Mr Wolf, Suzi the Cat, Sir Charlie Stinky Socks, Rory the Polar Bear, Kitty the Cat and the Night Monkey and Day Monkey to the StoryPhones download store!

We have just added eleven new titles to the BookShelf download store. All of the story sets have audio stories, songs, games and listening activites. They have been beautifully recorded by well known personalities such as Jo Brand, Dawn French and Imelda Staunton.

They’re  funny, noisy, gentle and surprising. Children are going to enjoy listening to these audio stories and songs and we are so pleased to be able to make all of these titles available to everyone using StoryPhones.

Thursday 17th March is St Patrick’s Day. You can download a free story about St Patrick’s Day from Storynory. Your children can find out about St Patrick and some of the legends associated with his life. If you would like to download this story, then you can click here.

It is well worth a visit to Storynory’s website, not just for St Patrick’s Day. The website packed with a huge variety of stories such as traditional tales, myths and legends and stories from around the world.  There are  stories for children of all ages and  interests and all of these audio stories can be downloaded for free. A brilliant resource and worth bookmarking!

We are using World Book Day to launch a new resource. Called the ‘Tell Then Listen’ stories, these resources provide a tradtional tale for a storytelling session, guidance and ideas and an audio version for children to listen to independently afterwards.

The first story in this series is called ‘Why the Sun and Moon Live in the Sky’

To celebrate World Book Day 2011, StoryPhones are giving this first story away free. To download this story click here

These are ideal resources for anyone wanting to carry out more storytelling with children but not quite sure how to go about this or don’t feel confident enough. The pack includes a simple story, ideas how to deliver the storytelling session, some picture resources and an audio version of the story.

Using the resources and audio story, you and your children can begin to build up a bank of traditional tales to retell, expand and explore.

If you would like to find out more about World Book Day 2011 then you can visit their website at http://www.worldbookday.com/