Tag: educational

iPad Apps for Kids: Fun Felt

A friend of mine, with the technical ability, would like to develop an app for kids so I’ve been trying to help him come up with an idea. The other day, after spotting my daughters Fuzzy Felts, I thought they would be a great idea for an app. However, by the time I text him and he replied, low and behold I found one already existed, Fun Felt by Quiros Apps (.69p).

I absolutely love it. My four year old and I’ve been playing with it for ages. It’s great for creativity, shape recognition, fine motor skills, spatial awareness and you’ll see it also lends to literacy and numeracy.

Only negative is that it froze on a couple of occasions which was a bit frustrating.

So what do you think of our first attempts?

Click here to download

Disclosure: I have used my own affiliate code for this post. So, on the off-chance that you purchase it I get a measly couple of pence.

iPad Apps for Kids: Park Math HD

I was looking for an iPad app for my daughter that introduced basic addition and subtraction using picture stories and came across Park Math HD (£1.49) by Duck Duck Moose. I’ve come across their apps before and liked them. I do like this one as well; there are activities for counting, adding, subtracting and sorting with 3 levels of differentiation. I wasn’t huge fan of the Swing Counting one but the others are good.

For more of our app reviews click here

Ipad Apps for Kids: Puppet Pals HD

Yet, another fantastic Ipad app recommendation from my mate Danny Nicholson from The Whiteboard Blog.  I absolutely love this app Puppet Pals, it’s also available for iphones but can’t help thinking the screen would be too small and fiddly for little fingers.

Simply choose your characters, a background, resize the images and when you’re ready push the record button, move your characters around and narrate your story.  Within seconds you have an animated story.  My daughter is only four and cracked it right away.  The educational value is limitless (literacy, listening and speaking, drama).

The basic version is free and comes with the Fairytale characters, but I’m tempted to buy the Director’s pass (£1.99), which includes custom content and all the characters, so we can start using our own images; including my daughter so we can plonk her right in the stories.  She’d go crazy!

Here is my daughter’s first attempt.  Do bear in mind she’s only 4 and the concept of a beginning, middle and end to a story is still beyond her.

For more of our app reviews click here

Ipad Apps for Kids: Jellybean Count

I absolutely love this Ipad app, Jellybean Count and to boot, it’s FREE!  It was recommended by my mate Danny Nicholson from The Whiteboard Blog.

Children count the different colour of jellybeans and then use the same number of fingers to input their answers.  For example, if there are 4 green jellybeans, they need to press on the green with four fingers; a very simple introduction to counting.  Plus, when they start to get to larger numbers like 6 they’re introduced to simple number bonds as they have to use 5+1 fingers.  Fantastic!

There is also a mode to have multiple players.

Download it now!

For more of our app reviews click here.

Wooden Toys

We were sent these beautiful wooden toys from the lovely folks at The Wooden Toy Shop.  Madame immediately set about trying to set the cakes out exactly like how they were on the box.  I think she did a pretty good job.  However, after a few minutes it dawned on me that I don’t actually know what a few of the cakes are.  I blame this on being a foreigner.  I’m okay with the fairy cakes, donut and Bourbon Biscuits, as it has Bourbon written on it but what are the other four??

My other big dilemma; Do I teach Madame that it’s Zee or Zed?  Is it a Zeh-bra or a Zee-bra??