Courtesy of The Guardian comes 50 of the best smartphone/iPad apps for children. Below is a snippet:
EDUCATION
FARM 123 – STORYTOYS JR iPhone/iPad – £1.49. Farm 123 aims to be a digital version of pop-up books, based on a character called Farmer Jo and his animals. It’s aimed at pre-school-age children, teaching them to count from one to 10 with cows, pigs and eggs.
FUNIMAL PHONICS iPhone/iPad – £0.69. Children and parents are well-used to phonics alphabet-learning now, and this stylish flash-cards app gives the discipline a friendly animal face. It’s also notable for its inclusion of both US and UK English accents when speaking sounds.
LITTLE DIGITS iPad – £1.49. This marvellous numbers app gets your child to count by placing fingers on the iPad’s touchscreen, with cute cartoon numbers appearing, depending on how many fingers are pressed. Simple maths tasks give it an educational angle too.
MY A-Z iPhone/iPad – £1.49. There are lots of alphabetical flash-card apps for iPhone, but this one stands out for its personalisation. Children can add their own photos and sounds for letters – a picture of their dog and its bark for “D”, and so on.
NUMBERLYS iPhone/iPad – £3.99. Despite the name, this beautiful app is more about letters than numbers. It’s a mixture of games and storytelling to explain the origins of the alphabet, with a visual style influenced by films like Metropolis and the original King Kong.
TIMES TABLES: SQUEEBLES MULTIPLICATION iPhone/iPad/Android – £0.69. This UK-developed app is aimed at 5- to 11-year-olds, providing a series of multiplication questions to earn stars and rescue cutesy characters from a nefarious Maths Monster. Up to four children can save their progress on one device.
THE SINGING ALPHABET iPhone/iPad – £0.69. A stylish app that does what it says on the tin: letters that sing. Specifically, they sing their own phonetic sounds, and can be combined to make harmonies and tunes. Given five minutes, your child will be singing along too.
COUNTING WITH THE VERY HUNGRY CATERPILLAR iPhone/iPad – £1.99. Eric Carle’s famous book about a fruit-munching caterpillar has been turned into a fun educational game with a mathematical skew. Your child identifies, counts and adds the foods over five levels, ensuring it appeals to a range of ages.
AROUND THE CLOCK iPhone/iPad – £1.49. This time-focused app wears its educational spurs lightly. It’s a collection of 24 mini-games, one for each hour of the day, from toothbrushing to pancake making. The idea is to familiarise children with the clock.
BAREFOOT WORLD ATLAS iPad – £2.99. If you have a child who is just becoming interested in geography, this is an essential buy. It’s a digital globe with music and animation, drawing kids in to the meat of its text and photographic entries on countries, people and nature.
CHANGE4LIFE FUN GENERATOR iPhone/iPad/Android – Free. Part of a wider Department of Health initiative to get families out and about, this app suggests more than 100 activities for children, filtering them by indoors/outdoors and the number of participants. A summer-holiday lifesaver for parents.
COOPER’S PACK: LONDON CHILDREN’S TRAVEL GUIDE iPhone/iPad – £1.49. For parents taking their children to London as a tourist, what better guide than a stuffed dog named Cooper? This travel app is a story-based guide to London’s history and attractions, with plenty of interactivity to keep children reading.
FAMIGO SANDBOX Android – Free. If you’re handing over an Android device to a child, Famigo Sandbox is invaluable. It filters the apps on your phone to only show those suitable for children, locks off other features, and recommends new apps they might like.
MOVE THE TURTLE iPhone/iPad – £1.99. Can five-year-olds start learning to program? They can with this app, which aims to teach the basics of computer programming by planning tasks – all presented by a friendly turtle character to spark their imagination.
THE HAPPY FACE iPhone/iPad – £0.69. Most parents have used a reward chart for their children at some point. This turns the idea into an app for use while out and about, moving children’s photos onto a happy or sad face according to their behaviour.
YOUR FANTASTIC ELASTIC BRAIN iPad – £1.99. Aimed at five-year-olds and up, this is a book app all about brains, using illustration and animation to explain some complex science, while throwing in “brain workout” games to help children stretch their grey cells.
Click on the link to read all 50.
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Topical Teaching 