Games4Life!

In need of physical education ideas? Get your school involved with Games4Life!

The NHS is launching a new Change4Life campaign in May 2012 called Games4Life. It aims to harness the fun and excitement around the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games to inspire children and their families to get more active.

The team has created Games4Life packs containing lots of fantastic ideas for primary teachers and schoolchildren to make the most of the energy and excitement of summer 2012.

If you're a primary school teacher, you can get your hands on a Games4Life pack for your school byregistering as a local supporter by following this link.  If you’re already a Change4Life local supporter, keep an eye out for the Change4Life newsletter which will have details on how to order your pack.

CDs and DVDs now available overseas!

Since we launched some of our resources on CD in October last year we have received a lot of emails asking us to make them available overseas.  We are now pleased to announced that our CD and DVD products are now available outside the UK and can be purchased in Europe, the US, Australia and New Zealand.

We currently have four discs available but have plans to launch more over the coming months:

Fairytales Resources CD
£6.99 for Europe and £7.99 for the world, including postage and packaging.

Letters and Sounds DVD
£7.49 for Europe and £8.49 for the world, including postage and packaging.

Editable Resources CD
£6.99 for Europe and £7.99 for the world, including postage and packaging.

Christmas Resources CD
£6.99 for Europe and £7.99 for the world, including postage and packaging.

CD/DVDs are great because they save time downloading and you can take the resources with you wherever you are - at school, home or on the move.

Look out for new CD products coming soon!

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year

As the year draws to a close the staff at SparkleBox would like to wish our visitors a very joyful Christmas and New Year.

It's been a super year and we are grateful to all those who have contributed to the website's continued success.  It has been hard work, but well worth it!

Your amazing ideas and suggestions have enabled our collection of products to grow massively over the year and visitor numbers continue to rise not only in the UK but right across the globe.  We now offer resources in fifteen different languages and receive regular visits from virtually every country on the planet.  Thank you to everyone who has taken the time to get in touch with translations, suggestions and comments.

You have all played a part in ensuring that SparkleBox has remained the number one teaching resource destination for millions of teachers, parents and education professionals this year.

Here's to an even bigger 2012!

Access resources at school, home or anywhere

SparkleBox is a massive bank of printable resources that can be downloaded quickly and easily and, of course, for free.  But occasionally you may find yourself without access to our site.  Maybe your travelling and don't have Internet access, or perhaps you're at school and your classroom computer cannot access the web.

We've received many requests over the past months to make our products available on CD so that teachers can have our resources to hand wherever they are, right at their fingertips.

We are pleased to announce the release of three new discs featuring hundreds of our products for easy access anywhere and we hope to expand the collection to include more CDs soon.

Letters and Sounds Resources DVD - £5.50
This DVD includes over 260 resources designed to accompany the DfES 'Letters and Sounds' publication.  Click here for more information and to order.

Christmas Resources CD - £4.99
A set of over 150 products for Christmas.  Get ready for the festive season with this bumper collection of printables!  Click here for more info.

Fairytale Resources CD - £4.99
Over 300 resources are included for a large selection of traditional and fairy tales.  Click here for more information.

At present CDs are only available in the UK but we hope to expand to overseas in the future.

We hope that these new additions to the site prove helpful.

Easier access to exclusive resources

100,000s people have downloaded the SparkleBox Toolbar and today we have implemented some substantial improvements to the way in which users can access the exclusive toolbar resources.

Now, when you visit SparkleBox with our toolbar installed, you can download the exclusive resources directly from the site without the need to trawl through the exclusives list on the toolbar as before.  If you have our toolbar, just find the resource you want on SparkleBox, click the yellow 'More Information' button and you'll be taken straight to the download page for the resource.

This improvement now also means that Mac users can access these additional free resources using our toolbar on Safari.

Clicking the 'Exclusives' button on the toolbar now takes you to SparkleBox to easily browse through the full selection of toolbar-only resources.

If you have our toolbar, you should find that these enhancements happen automatically.  However, if they don't, you can ensure you have the latest version of our toolbar by clicking the small down arrow next to the SparkleBox logo on the left and select 'Refresh Toolbar' or alternatively install the latest version from www.sparklebox.co.uk/toolbar.

SparkleBox wins Top 10 Website Award

We're pleased to announce that SparkleBox is an Experian Hitwise Top 10 Winner for the period January to June 2011.

During this period, www.sparklebox.co.uk ranked in the top 10 based on market share of visits among all United Kingdom websites in the Hitwise Education - Reference industry.

Thank you to the hundreds of thousands of visitors who's encouragement and brilliant ideas have helped SparkleBox's popularity continue to grow, not just in the UK but right around the world.

We will keep on doing what we do best:  producing original and new premium quality teaching resources and, unlike other sites, we won't ever charge a penny.

Start of year demand on site

This evening we're receiving much higher than expected visitor levels due to the beginning of the new school year in the UK.  As a result some of our products are downloading very slowly.

We have people working to improve this at present, but we would recommend visiting a little later on if you are experiencing any problems.

Thank you for your patience.