Mo Willems is best known as the award winning Author and illustrator of  kid’s favorites like Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus!, the Elephant and Piggie series and the Knuffle Bunny books. He now also has  a brand new app! Pigeon Presents: Mo on the Go! where you try to fill your sticker vault by playing mini games, drawing and dancing! The fun includes: Draw with Mo:  Use your imagination to turn a scribble from Mo  into your own doodle. A child can also play with a friend with one… Read more

Right after I posted 10 free math apps for school age kids, I found another free math app that is also quite engaging.  It is called Free the Balloon.  It helps kids practice skip counting via games. The basic game play idea is simple.  Kids follow the teacher’s instructions at the beginning of the game on a blackboard, like “count by 1 from 4 to 15”. They then move the balloons, in the correct order, through the hoops labeled with… Read more

Ancient Greece by Kids Discover is a fun read for kids to learn about Greece.  It is free for limited time.  The app covers topics such as: Greek Gods, Athens, The Olympics, Life in Ancient Greece, Lasting Achievements, Greek Drama, Literature, and Architecture. It is a great reading experience with the right interactive features.  For example, for the section about Trojan Horse, kids will see the horse move towards the gate, and when it stops, the visual shows soldiers inside… Read more

Night Zookeeper is, in the simplest terms, a drawing app.  However, the approach it takes to get kids to use the entire scope of their imaginations in their drawings makes it so much more than that.  The fact that parents can directly inspire and facilitate their children’s creativity through this app is just a bonus. First, parents will want to register so they can open the Teleporting Torch Dashboard.  This enables parents to send missions to their children and also upload… Read more

Playroom-Lessons with Max is an educational app from lgromatic. It’s designed with pre-school children in mind. What it offers that’s just a little bit different is the way in which parents are able to protect children from inadvertently gaining online access while using the app. The Max in question is a little kitten and he’s the star in the five games contained within the app. Designed to re-inforce early learning skills, the five games involve a search for hidden toys… Read more

We’re big fans of Richard Scarry so anything we come across of his in app form is very exciting. One of our personal favorite pages of Richard Scarry’s Best First Book Ever is of all the different silly cars. There’s a pickle car, a pencil car, even an egg car. So imagine our excitement when we discovered this app is about spelling out the different kinds of cars stopped at the stop light? Once you spell them correctly, the car… Read more

Kidaptive, the creator of the award-winning Leo’s Pad app, has released a new educational app called Leo’s Letters.  This free game app allows kids to search for letters formed by stars in the night sky and then form three, four, or five letter words. When kids start the app, they will see a night sky full of starts.  They have to find the letters in the sky. They can search for letters by moving and spinning the sky. When they find a letter, they… Read more

Ultimate Shark Free from Discovery is a great app to learn about shark. It includes information about 10 deadliest sharks: Great White, Tiger, Bull and others. It is packed with stunning pictures and videos, well written texts. Kids and adults will learn a lot about sharks from the app: each shark’s size, habitat, body parts, such as teeth, life span, … I am most impressed with the visual effect of the app. It is not only in the pictures and… Read more

To master Multiplication and Division a student needs to begin with an understanding of the relationship between repeated addition, skip counting and multiplication. Speed! by Highhill Education offers Skip counting practice cleverly disguised as a fun and addictive (physical) card game. We are excited to share the app version of the game where you can now challenge a friend or your iPad. There are eight decks of cards 2’s, 3’s, 4’s, 5’s, 6’s, 7’s, 8’s and 9’s. Deck 2’s is for skip counting by 2, Deck 3’s is for skip counting… Read more

Today I am reviewing a handwriting and math activity app called 123 Tracing by Kids Academy Company. Learning numbers is a fundamental concept to basic math, this app helps children learn their numbers through the use of tracing and handwriting. It is a very basic app consisting of the numbers one through ten, allowing your child to trace the numbers. It encourages repetition which increases mastery. They have added in a game of catching fireflies throughout the app. The more… Read more

Do you use apps for kids handwriting or other fine motor skill practice? I don’t know if you ever noticed, I have not reviewed any hand writing apps. There are quite a few out there, but I felt tracing with one finger on the screen is completely different from holding a pen writing on paper. I don’t see tracing with finger require many finger muscles at all. Call me old fashioned, I still want my child to be able to write well with a pen… Read more

Young Scientists and Bill Nye fans get excited! To celebrate 20 years of Bill Nye the Science guy Disney has launched an anniversary App. Open Nye labs by ‘scanning’ your fingerprint and then explore all of the Retro Gadgets and objects on Bill Nye’s desk. The set up of the app is all exploratory. Kids can tap around on his desk to find interesting things.  Some of the fun things we discovered right away: The robot takes kids to a Mini game of artifact digging. The… Read more

Goodnight Moon was our favorite bedtime book for years.  I was really happy to see it on App Store. Margaret Wise Brown and Clement Hurd created the book 65 years ago.  It is a children’s book you will always like to read and enjoy the reading no matter how old you are.  This app version stays very true to the original print book, with added interactivities to some images. There are 3 ways to read the book: Auto Play, Read to… Read more

AHhhhh! This is my kind of App. I love a good leveling educational app with a printable worksheet component that meets Common Core Standards. Nothing in life makes me happier. The Phonics Munch App gets your little one on the path to early reading with a cute story about Chomper the Bear who eats letters, consonant and vowel sounds and rhyming words…and he is just SO cute. The program reinforces what it teaches by using several different methods to create… Read more