The SparkleBox Blog

CDs and DVDs now available overseas!

2012-01-19T17:08:00.002Z

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

2011-12-15T19:20:00.000Z

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

2011-10-25T16:18:00.001+01:00

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

2011-10-16T14:59:00.000+01:00

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

2011-09-12T14:21:00.001+01:00

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

2011-09-05T21:34:00.000+01:00

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.

Server issues - now resolved

2011-08-23T13:04:00.000+01:00

A quick apology to visitors who may have been experiencing difficulties downloading some of our products this morning. This was due to unprecedented visitor levels and therefore unexpected demand on some of our servers. We have now resolved the issue and files should be downloading without problem and at a good speed.

Thank you for bearing with us.

Phoneme Resource Collections

2011-05-05T11:58:00.000+01:00

We've added a new section in our Alphabet and Sounds area called Phoneme Resource Collections.

This section contains resources organised by phoneme and, over time, we hope to create extensive collections of products that are linked specifically to individual phonemes so that you have useful bank of printables for teaching different letters and sounds.

Head on over to http://www.sparklebox.co.uk/cll/alphabet/phoneme-collections/ to see what's currently available and feel free to suggest a resource that you would find useful if included.

Click Fund update

2011-05-05T10:32:00.000+01:00

An update on our Click Fund initiative whereby SparkleBox is supporting good causes by donating money each month as well as offering free charity promotion.

In March and April our visitors showed their support for charities by clicking on our Click Fund promotions nearly 9000 times, and as a result we've gave away £899.50 to the following charities:

£199.30 to British Red Cross New Zealand Earthquake Appeal
£400.00 to Comic Relief
£300.20 to Save the Children Ivory Coast Appeal

Please do continue to show your support by clicking on our special yellow promotions located around SparkleBox. It costs you nothing and we'll give away 10 pence to charity for every click you make.

For more information, visit www.sparklebox.co.uk/clickfund

February charity donations

2011-03-08T18:29:00.002Z

A thank you to everyone who clicked last month in support of our charity Click Fund initiative whereby we aim to promote worthy good causes and support them financially by donating from our profits.

As part of our February trial we donated a total of £423.10 to charity - that's equivalent to 4231 clicks on our special Click Fund promotions around the site. For more information, see www.sparklebox.co.uk/clickfund/.

We hope to give away even more in March, so do show your support by clicking our special Click Fund promotions - it costs you nothing.

Translation

2011-01-14T15:40:00.000Z

Thanks to our helpful visitors, we are now creating new Welsh resources again and will begin making products in other languages soon.

Welsh resources
We already have a large number of resources available in Welsh, and we couldn't do that without your help. If you would like a resource to be available in Welsh, you can submit a translation at www.sparklebox.co.uk/welsh/translate/ and we will get on the case.

The newest Welsh resources can be found at www.sparklebox.co.uk/welsh/new.html.

Translating into foreign languages
If you are able to translate into other languages, you can also submit translations for French, Spanish, German, Italian and Maori resources at www.sparklebox.co.uk/topic/mfl/translate/

Our New Zealand visitors will notice that Maori is new on the list. If you can translate any of our resources to Maori, please do consider helping. Watch out for new resources very soon.

Kia ora!

Site updates - December 2010

2010-12-23T17:16:00.001Z

Aside from all the lovely new resources we have been adding every day, here are some of the other recent updates to SparkleBox:

New Reading resources section in Literacy
Resources for Time better-organised in Numeracy
Improved role-play resources area with more resources for each role-play and improved organisation in Topics
Programmable robot printables have been re-organised in Miscellaneous

And have you seen our Start Page? The recent UK snow is even falling there, but we can guarantee this will only be during the holiday period!

A very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all our visitors.

Site updates - November 2010

2010-11-01T13:44:00.000Z

Here are the latest improvements and additions to sparklebox.co.uk. We hope you find them useful.

General updates

New Numbers and Patterns section in Numeracy with resources to accompany the DCSF publication.

New Homework resources section in Miscellaneous

Added an Instructions resources page in Literacy

Bear-themed resources listing added in Topics

A4 Page Borders section has been re-organised in Miscellaneous

Resources for Wales, Australia and USA

Preview pages for resources that have alternative versions for Wales (in Welsh), Australia and USA are being updated so that visitors can switch between the different versions.

For example:

Transport-themed playdough mats - http://www.sparklebox.co.uk/1366-1370/sb1368.html - includes link to the Welsh version.
Colour/Colours display banner - http://www.sparklebox.co.uk/3201-3210/sb3209.html - includes link to the American version.
What can I buy? price tags and purses - http://www.sparklebox.co.uk/3211-3220/sb3220.html - includes links to the Welsh, Australian and American versions.

Future updates

There have been lots of emails asking that we begin updating the KS2 site again. When things are in place, we hope to begin doing this early next year.

Also, the Welsh section is in the process of being redeveloped and new Welsh resources will be added soon.

Thank you for using our web site.

Site updates - September/October 2010

2010-10-10T17:40:00.006+01:00

An update on some of the most recent changes to the www.sparklebox.co.uk website:

Full re-design of our Browser Start Page

New Spelling resources section in Literacy

New Letter formation section in Literacy - Writing

New Katie Morag resources page in Literacy - Stories

New Travel and Transport section in Topics - Everyday life

New Our Environment section in Topics - Everyday life

New Leisure and Sports section in Topics - Everyday life

New Display Lettering section in Miscellaneous - Classroom display

We hope these changes are useful.

Resources by subject

2010-09-20T12:36:00.004+01:00

Some changes have been made which improve the ability to search on the site and just today a new index has been added so that resources can be located by National Curriculum subjects. This can be found at www.sparklebox.co.uk/subjects/

Topic-based resources have now been conveniently organised into all the major NC subjects:

Design and Technology

Modern Foreign Languages

Don't forget to check for new resources every day or subscribe to receive our email updates.

Brand new resources

2010-09-06T16:08:00.005+01:00

The team are once again adding brand new resources! We are regularly adding new resources why not have a look at our new resources page at www.sparklebox.co.uk/new.html.

We're also taking suggestions by email to enquiries@sparklebox.co.uk or using the suggest button on our toolbar.

Thank you for your continued support.

Watch this space!

2010-07-16T14:20:00.003+01:00

Keep an eye out for news, information and updates from SparkleBox right here. More to come soon - watch this space!