Kids Iphone App Review
Our kids test them, we review them!

Lilo Helps the Easter Bunny by Kids App Design Studio is a great learning adventure app. Really Lilo Helps the Easter Bunny by Kids App Design Studio is an app for exploration. My four year old will not put it down once we remind her to play it.

Just as the title says you are helping the Easter Bunny find their eggs. The app starts with a simple story and then changes into different activities where you can color eggs or paint them as the story continues. The app was developed by a Dutch developer and is available in a few languages. The translation is apparent, but it does not take away from the game at all.

This is the sort of app you could give to two kids on the iPad and let them work together to make it through the story.

You cannot see it in the video, but many of the items on the page move when touched. The spider crawls, the monkey moves, and there are several more interactive elements to each page. Be sure to explore!

Fun – 5
Attention – 5
Learning – 2

Total – 12

Story-Boards Little Bot Big Bot By OmegeBlueStudio is a really fun learn-to-read app. In the app you follow around the Bot and learn that he is small on his planet, but large on ours. In the game you are simply presenting with words on cardboard cut-outs. You are first read the words by a youngster, and then you can read them yourself along with the adult. The graphics are very interesting and the way the game is laid out makes for a book that is easy to follow.

Story-Boards Little Bot Big Bot By OmegeBlueStudio reminds me of the Dick and Jane book style of reading. Your child is learning site-words and the process of reading. Once they are comfortable with the words in Story-Boards Little Bot Big Bot By OmegeBlueStudio they can move on to another book or perhaps OmegeBlueStudio will release another book!

Attention – 5
Learning – 5
Fun – 5
Total – 15

This is a universal app, so it works great on both the iPad and the iPhone.

I was a bit confused when I first opened Baby’s First Monsters: 123 By Three Brothers. I thought that it might just be a dictionary app for kids to learn about mythological creatures. I was wrong.

Baby’s First Monsters: 123 By Three Brothers is a fun learning game, in this case numbers is what you will be learning. By visiting the various islands you can count the ears on the monsters, or the feet, or just the monsters themselves. Without realizing it your child is counting by twos and threes and so on. It is a fun app with great artwork that will keep your child engaged.

My four year old really likes the app, but isn’t quite ready to actually get the counting by multiples yet. That is ok she can still experience the app and learn through practice. It is fun to watch and achieve the various levels of the game. She still learns to count by singles and a great re-enforcer for when she starts preschool in a few days.

Fun – 5
Learning – 5
Attention – 3 (she wont play it for hours, but still very engaging)

Total – 13

Papa Penguin By Ideal Bureaucracy LLC is a fun and simple counting app. The idea is you are the Papa Penguin and your family needs fish. So you swim down and gather the amount of fish request by your family before running out of air. The game is easy to understand and builds number skills and some hand eye coordination in your child.

Is it fun? It sure is. Is it a challenge? Yep. Will it keep your child occupied for hours on end? Probably not, but a fun counting app isn’t that easy to come by so Papa Penguin By Ideal Bureaucracy LLC is worth the download.

Fun – 5
Learning – 4
Attention – 2

Total – 11

Paint My Wings by Toca Boca is an app my four year old absolutely loves. She took to it immediately and has painted probably 40 butterflies in the past few days. She spends a lot of time one each butterfly and of course she takes a picture of each one.

Paint My Wings by Toca Boca is another beautifully simple app. You are presented with a butterfly and asked to paint its wings. On the left you get several colors to choose from but the colors come as blueberries, strawberries, blackberries, etc. The neat thing is that when you paint the left wing the color is automatically repeated on the right (just like we assume in nature). When my four year old realized this she was very pleased. You could see the recognition in her eyes.

Your child just paints with her finger and can adjust the “brush” in the bottom left. For older kids (or parents) this means we can create some neat butterflies. For the kids it is a change of pace. Great app.

Fun – 5
Attention – 5
Learning – 2 (hand eye coordination, but really this is a fun app not a learning app).

Total – 12

Toca Doctor by Toca Boca lets your child be a doctor, well sorta

Have fun while killing germs, repairing bones, clearing up a red eye, and more. My four year old has played with this app for HOURS so far. In the past few days she has spent more time with this app than any other. Over and over again she fixes the bones, plugs the nose, applies bandages to the scrapes. She is really having fun.

Does it teach anything? Sure it does. Perhaps some responsibility and cleanliness. It also makes the breaks and scrapes seem less scary. It is a fun and engaging app.

Must have this app!

Fun – 5
Attention – 5
Learning – 3

Total – 13

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.

Dolch Words by Tap To Learn is really 6 grades worth of words to learn. It is a simple app where you child learns to recognize words by placing the letters into the right position. The word and letters are repeated along with a picture of the object the word represents. It is a nicely done app that has the potential to teach your child a lot of words.

The words get pretty hard. It lists up to level or grade 5, but really it is the type of word that gets difficult. The words become more abstract. This makes them harder to understand and grasp. The idea being that you learn to spell the word and recognize it by sight. Good idea, common practice.

Attention – 3
Learning – 5
Fun – 0 (It is a learning app)

Total – 8

Sometimes it is easier to get your child to play a game then it is to get them to learn. It can also be true that you want your child to learn in a few different ways. Counting numbers, reciting numbers, and counting backwards can be fun, but it abstract counting can be fun too. What do I mean by abstract counting?

Sam Phibian By 3CD gets your child to count and learn numbers by getting Sam Phibian the amphibian to eat a certain number of flies. It is fun, interesting to young children and makes them think about the colors and flies they have already gotten Sam to eat.

I suppose it also teaches hand eye coordination, abstract thinking, as well as number skills, but really it is a fun way to eat flies and act like a frog. Does it work? Yep. I just told my four year old to eat the number of colored flies shown at the bottom of the screen and she was off. She likes to get Sam to wear funny hats and be goofy, but she also gets the counting part too.

Fun – 5
Learning – 4 (you really only learn one thing, but that is ok)
Attention – 4

Total – 13

Check out my four year old and I playing with the app: