All About Apps

My parents gave each of my children an iPad for their second birthdays and told me to constantly have appropriate educational apps on it. I once wrote a post about my feelings towards my son’s iPad here. I often see on my news feed that parents are looking for apps for their children to keep them entertained on plane rides or at doctor visits, so today I will share with you some of my favorite apps that I have discovered.  (To help navigate the post, names that are bolded are the developer and the names in italics are the titles of the program.) I also apologize in advance that I do not remember which of these I paid for and which are free but I promise you each one I spent money on has been worth every penny and that since I only have an iPad, I only know for sure these are iPad compatible. 

At two years old, my children were still mastering the basics – letter recognition, number recognition, colors, shapes and songs. Every Fisher Price app I ever downloaded I absolutely loved.

Shapes and Colors – a brightly colored piano and floating shapes help master these skills with catchy tunes.

Storybook (1, 2, 3) – animates popular nursery rhymes and gives you the option to read along or sing along and play as you go!

Market – three adorable games for the youngest food lover. One is a grocery checkout, one is shopping for foods in the market and one is helping “Baker Bob” bake some treats for his bakery (and you can choose cupcakes, apple pie or chocolate chip cookies).

For letters and numbers, I highly recommend the Endless Learning package. You can also get each app separately, Endless Reader (which focuses on sight words), Endless ABC (which goes above and beyond beginner alphabet), Endless 1,2,3 (which teaches numbers 1-100) and Endless Wordplay which focuses on basic spelling and rhyming words. What I love about Reader and ABC is that it helps a child spell a word and use it properly in a sentence (with an adorable graphic to help a child understand the vocabulary).  I also have Little Writer by Alligator Apps that helps a child learn to trace upper and lower case letters in addition to numbers, shapes and simple words. I found that this helped my son learn to write his name and also gave him an opportunity to practice letter writing on fogged up windows.

For those of you looking for beginner apps in Hebrew, I have found success with Hebrew Tots which includes the aleph bet, numbers, colors and basic opposites and Sarah and David Interactive Alphabet Story which focuses on the Hebrew alphabet in a cute storybook fashion.

For little ones interested in sorting, matching, building towers and basic problem solving, Tiny Hands Towers, Sorting and What’s My Pair are a must for your iPad. Children will feel proud of themselves for solving each level and they get a round of applause with each completed puzzle! (And if puzzles are your child’s favorite thing, you must get them Puzzingo “the greatest puzzle on earth”!)

Nosy Crow is an amazing app developer and there is nothing of theirs that I haven’t been satisfied with. From interactive fairy tales (I have Cinderella, Jack and Beanstalk, Red Riding Hood and Goldilocks) to teaching about animal lifecycles (I have Frog and Penguin) to basic building (architecture related) apps (Bizzy Farm and Bizzy Builds), my children can stick with one of these for a half hour easily. There are problems to solve, structures to build and animals that need to be fed.

If tools and engineering are up your child’s alley, you may want to consider Tiny Bop’s Simple Machines that focuses on the use of levers, pulleys, angles and other physics related tools I never understood the mechanics of until I played this with my son. I also want to suggest the Sago Mini Toolbox, where one learns how to use tools (saws, hammers, scissors, wrenches etc.) and then build cool things like scooters and bird feeders with the tools you now know how to use.

There are some apps I have that I believe are a little sophisticated for my son (he is four and a half) but since they were the only ones that fit the bill of interest, he has them (and much to my surprise he can play them correctly and even get to level 65!). Seven Academy has two amazing apps called Crazy Gears and Busy Shapes that focus on connecting gears or shapes correctly to advance to the next level (each game has the same premise). They start off easy and get extremely complex so make sure your child doesn’t get anxious if he reaches a level he can’t complete (and unfortunately if you are my son who asks me for help at level 67 and I don’t have a clue – I just reset it to level 1). He also has amazing learning apps by Urban Pockets that teach about the mechanics of a car (My Car), the different systems in the body (My Body) and weather patterns (My Weather). He also has a great app called Tic Toc Time which teaches how to tell time and use a compass. As you can see, we are ready for kindergarten!

The last app I want to mention is Small Street. It is almost a children’s version of Sim City, where you are required to build a successful town, hire workers, collect rent and make money. I downloaded it by accident but for an older child who understands the basic concept can get addicted to this game really quickly (I would say perfect for 7-10 year olds).

I hope some of you find this useful and feel free to share any amazing apps you have found along this journey of new ways to entertain young ones in the twenty first century!