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My lil’ Books- The Farm By Editions First-Gründ

  • July 25, 2011 7:48 am

My lil’ Books- The Farm By Editions First-Gründ is simple and fun app for young kids. Your child is presented with a set of common farm animals; a sheep, chicken, donkey?, and many more. Clicking on a farm animal brings up a larger image of the animal where your child is told to click the square to find out more.

This is where the app gets fun. You can feed the donkey and play with the other animals in the app and they make animal noises, which is fun for kids. It really is a neat app once you get into it a bit. My daughter spent about 15 minutes on the app initially and has returned to play with it several more times since. Learning about animals, their names, the sounds they make is an important thing for a young child to learn and it is fun!

Fun – 4
Learning – 5
Attention – 3

Total – 12

Animal Words by Oh, Hello!

  • July 1, 2011 2:25 pm

Animal Words by Oh, Hello! Is a simple fun app for young children to learn about animal sounds. The interface is simple and clean–just what you want in an app like this. Your child selects an animal and hears the name of the animal. There are three different voices/languages to choose from. Two English and one is Czech I believe.

That is about it. Simple,fun, interesting, but ultimately a short lived app for a young child. Is it worthwhile? Sure.

Fun – 3
Learning – 5
Attention – 3

Doggie Go Go by GroundHum.com

  • June 13, 2011 6:41 am

Doggie Go Go by GroundHum.com is a very engaging app for young kids. It is a “side scroller” type application instead of a “page flipper” or level based application. You move from left to right in the app to see the rest of the game.

Can your child learn something from Doggie Go Go by GroundHum.com? Sure. If you help. The game is very engaging, as I said earlier, but it does not guide the child through any learning activities per se. I suppose the ice cream scoops do sort of have some learning potential, but really the parent needs to be there to assist in the learning process or it will not take place.

Is this app worth the download? Sure. It grabs the attention of my four year old and keeps it for a very long time. The game is very multidimensional with the dog as the main character and a backdrop of many activities. It is a fun app for kids and my four year old likes to explore it–even a month or more after downloading the app.

Fun – 5
Learning – 2
Attention – 5
Total – 12

This app is available for the iPhone and iPad.

Animal Sounds By Oak Multimedia

  • June 4, 2011 7:04 am

Animal Sounds By Oak Multimedia is a simple app for a small child. It has a set of animals that your young child can pick and listen to the noises they make. The animals are drawn well and the sounds are right on. It is great for a young child of 1+ years who is just learning their animal sounds.

I think it is a good app, but it has one flaw. The never really enjoy shaking my iPhone or iPad. It is hard for my four year old daughter to shake the device sometimes too. For a one year old it would be nearly impossible. . The developer has updated the app to address this issue and you now have the option to not need to shake the device! Awesome! That being said this is not the type of app that a small child would play with by themselves. It is a way for an involved parent to teach their child animal sounds in a new and interesting way.

I do recommend the app, but would like to be able to touch the animal to make it make its sound!

My four year old is giggling and having a fun time while she is playing with the app.

Attention – 4
Learning – 4
Fun – 4

Total – 12

The Going To Bed Book Sandra Boynton Loud Crow Interactive

  • May 30, 2011 7:46 am

We have come to love The Going To Bed Book Sandra Boynton Loud Crow Interactive. It is a neat book to read just before bed. Initially I wasn’t impressed with the voice, but realized that it is a very soothing voice for my daughter. She still gets to play with the characters as we have come to be accustomed to.

The book does a great job of getting you ready for bed. The characters all do the normal pre-bed tasks. You interact with them and my favorite part is the screen fogging up. A neat book by a great author narrated in a very appropriate manner.

Attention – 5
Fun – 3
Learning – 4

Total – 12

Hokey Pokey Superheroes by Cambridge English Online ltd

  • May 25, 2011 7:56 am

I remember dancing to the Hokey Pokey at the local skating rink when I was kid. It was fun to make silly faces and dance around crazy to the song. Everyone participated–even the parents. It was a lot of fun.

Hokey Pokey Superheroes by Cambridge English Online ltd brings back that same fun and silliness. Hokey Pokey Superheroes by Cambridge English Online ltd makes the game fun again by playing the song so we can dance along. There are a few other treats in the app as well like a song that lets you add your own body part.

The point is the game is simple and fun. Camping? Play the app? Sitting around the living room with the kids and have five minutes before bed? Do the hokey pokey. It just works.

Fun – 5
Learning – 1
Attention – 5 (it isn’t that your kids will play for hours, but rather that you will play with your kids for a bit!)

Total 11

Kids Song Machine By Genera Kids

  • April 22, 2011 7:50 am

Kids Song Machine By Genera Kids is a fun app that both my 4 year old and 10 year old really like. The three of sat on the floor around the iPad (it works on the iPhone too!) and laughed and pressed characters as the song played. It was fun to pick a song and the interface was simple for even a young three year old. Really just two buttons to press–song selection and then go!

My four year old is scared of the “scary” song, but not really. I think she likes to think it is scary and she is a big kid because she can listen to it without freaking out. The only catch is that the child might get stuck in a song if they are in the back seat and out of reach since the go back or exit button is kinda hard to find. It might be nice if the song just ended and left you to pick a new song. Maybe not?

In either case it is a fun app that will hold your child’s attention for a good while!

Attention – 5
Fun – 4
Learning – 1

Total – 10 and that is ok. Some apps are just plain fun to play with. This is one of those apps!

Pop Out! The Tale of Peter Rabbit by Loud Crow

  • April 15, 2011 7:13 am

Pop Out! The Tale of Peter Rabbit by Loud Crow is yet another stellar app/book for your iPad or iPhone. The neat thing about this app was the little tabs you can pull on to get the characters to move, but that is only the start. Click the tree or the blueberries and you are in for a surprise. Keep clicking them!

Loud Crow was kind enough to give away a promo code for this book and we have awarded it to a randomly selected reader. Her review is already in and the app is a success with her <1 year old! Wow I would not have thought that this book would have been appropriate for such a young age, but I am convinced.

Does the app read to you? Yes. A pleasant voice? yep. Interactive? You got it. Learning is there too with the highlighting of words with selection to repeat the word. My daughter loves the book and we are at the point now where we are pushing apps to the farthest pages of our device. This app stays in the reading books folder for sure.

Attention - 5
Learning - 5
Fun -5
Total - 15

How could you not like this book on the ipad or iphone?

The Three Little Pigs by Nosy Crow

  • April 10, 2011 7:02 am

The Three Little Pigs by Nosy Crow is a book I was really excited to review with my young daughter. We usually read these books together the first few times and then she ends up finding the book a week later or so and playing through it again on her own. I am really happy to see so many books for review on the iPad and iPhone. I started this blog thinking there would be a lot of learning apps and this past month I have really found that to be true. Reading is a key skill for kids (of course) and at a young age we need to be getting them into the spirit. If the iPad helps, then great!

What sets The Three Little Pigs by Nosy Crow apart from most of the other books out there is the scenery, and the way the book moves, and the interaction. I haven’t seen a book that combines all three in such a useful way. We all know the story of the three little pigs, but when the wolf huffs and puffs your child will too–and the mic picks up the sound to blow the house down.

Your child can build the houses, they can make the pigs flip, and interact with the book in some of the usual ways too. This is a classic app. Sounds kind of funny now, but this is an app that is setting the stage for the other books and your child will come back to it 30 or 40 times I am sure.

Attention – 5
Fun – 5
Learning – 5

Total – 15

My Family Food by FamilyFUNdamentals

  • February 14, 2011 7:44 am

My Family Food by FamilyFUNdamentals interested me a lot. As a guy that visits the gym a bit I tend to watch what I eat pretty closely. Personally I use Daily Burn, so when My Family Food by FamilyFUNdamentals came across my desk I was very interested.

The basics of the app are that it allows you to track the nutrition for each member of your family. I used it to track the nutrition for my two daughters, but I included my food most of the time too. The kids get awards based on their eating habits and this really excited them. I spoke with the creator of the app and it is not networked and this means that we had to track nutrition only on my iPhone rather than on either my wife’s phone or mine, which would have been a neat addition.

Does the app work? Yes it certainly does. I found it to perform well against our eating habits and on our devices. The kids were happy when they had eaten their goals and we always allowed a treat for the rewards too. It was fun for the parents, but it is also a lot of work. This app is for the parent who is really concerned about their child’s nutrition. We all should be making sure our kids eat well and this app can help.

I personally feel that a diet is something that is doomed to fail. Just the name means failure to me. I also believe we all have a diet–most of us have a bad diet. So using this app for a few weeks does one main thing and that is to teach your kids the healthy eating habits they should have. It took me into my 30′s to learn these habits. I still break them, but at least my four year old and nine year old are learning them young. For that reason this app is getting a high learning score.

I do not have a video showing the app in use since my kids rarely used it. My now ten year old would enter food, but she cheats, so really I used it. It is a great app for parents :) Lock your phone too.

Fun – 4
Learning – 5
Attention – 3

Total 12, but in this category a 10 would be awesome.