Hellobee

We’ve been visiting our parents in LA and the Philippines every August, which entails taking 8 flights and 6 days of travel. We normally limit screen time for the kids, but all bets are off when we travel internationally!

Olive checking out the iPad in the Philippines

Before our big trip, we downloaded a bunch of apps for the kids. Here are the ones that emerged from the process kid-tested and parent-approved!

 

1. Monkey Math School Sunshine, $1.99

When Charlie was two, he absolutely loved Monkey Preschool Lunchbox… a game which helped him learn to match and count. Now that he’s in his threes, we tried out the sequel, Monkey Math School Sunshine… and Charlie loved it too!

He has been slowly getting the hang of addition and subtraction:

And learned to quickly count items and identify if they match a certain number:

I was surprised to see that kids could learn the word “pentagon” and understand that they have five sides… but after many passes of trial and error, he seemed to get the hang of it:

This number tracing mini-game is great at teaching him about numbers and also at encouraging fine motor skills:

I never would’ve thought that kids could learn patterns at a young age, but now I am a believer.

If this app has taught me anything, it’s that I continually underestimate how much kids can learn when they’re having fun!  This app is a definite buy.

2. Endless Alphabet, $5.99

This app is a bit hard to explain with words, so check out this video:

Charlie enjoys this app, but the real surprise is that Olive has been LOVING this app at 23 months! The app is definitely helping her matching skills, and her fine motor skills too. Plus every time she spells a word, she cries out, “I did it!!”  The best part about this app is that it sounds out each letter when you touch it so kids not only learn letters, but also how each one sounds. As for learning the alphabet, I don’t think she knows it yet but review after review says that their two year old learned the alphabet using this app.

The app costs six bucks, but is definitely worth it every penny. My favorite part is how when you select a letter and start dragging it, it starts making the phonetic sound. This makes it a really powerful learning tool for kids.

3. Kids Doodle, Free

I definitely underestimated this free app.  I was looking for a simple app where the kids could draw – especially Charlie, since he’s obsessed with drawing and sometimes we don’t have paper with us when we’re on the road. I downloaded a bunch of drawing apps, including Kids Doodle; the app didn’t seem that impressive so I didn’t bother showing Charlie the app more than once and was planning on deleting it.

The amazing thing is that Charlie actually decided on his own that he loved this app, and he started opening it and drawing all by himself. You can change your “pen” to neon, which he loves to do.

There’s even a movie mode, where you can draw something and then click “play”… and the app will replay your entire drawing from the beginning, stroke-by-stroke! Both Charlie and Olive loved the “movie” part of the drawing app, which doubled the fun they had with the app.

One word of warning is that two kids can’t use this app at the same time, since Apple’s “multi-touch” interface gets confused when two fingers are touching the screen at the same time. So whenever we fire up this app, we have to make sure that we have both of our phones available… otherwise the two kids try to draw at the same time, and everyone gets frustrated.

It costs a dollar to go “ad free” on this app, and it’s definitely worth it.

4. Toca Train, $2.99

We have several apps in the Toca series. The Toca Train app is a revelation. Like a lot of Toca Boca apps, you can’t win or lose… it’s just open-ended play.

You drive the train around:

Pick up and drop off passengers at the station:

Swap out your cargo (Charlie always chooses the pumpkin):

There are no points – you can’t win or lose, you just drive your train around.  It’s such a simple app, but both Charlie and Olive have loved it from around ages 2 – 3 1/2.

5. Toca Kitchen, $2.99

This app enables more open-ended play; it lets you prepare food to feed a boy, a girl, a cow or a cat.

You can pick the food you want to cook out of a fridge…

and then prep it in the kitchen!

Charlie loves cooking the food, putting it in a food processor, chopping it up and serving it to his guest.

It took us a while to figure out that only the cow eats the hay, but other than that the app was really easy for a 3 year old to figure out!

A definite recommend.

6. Toca House, $2.99

This is another fun one. It’s not as open-ended as Toca Train or Toca Kitchen, but basically you can play 19 little mini-games where you do things like sort the mail…

Or mop the floor:

Our kids love to help us clean the house, so this helps them scratch that particular itch.  Not as educational as the previous apps, but great for fine motor skills.

7. Toca Doctor, $2.99

This is a series of “mini games” just like Toca House.  First you pick a part of the body you want to doctor:

Then you can pluck out thorns:

Clean out bugs in your patient’s hair:

Or match & drag body parts to where they should go:

For some reason, I liked this particular game more than Toca House – and so did Charlie!  The user interface is really easy to figure out, even though most Toca games don’t have verbal instructions (the people “speak” in a sort of mumble, kind of like the adults on Charlie Brown). Charlie struggled a bit at first with some of the mazes, but he’s been getting better at them over time.

8. Bugs and Buttons, $2.99

This is another counting/patterns/matching game.

What distinguishes this app from others is the quality of the animation – it’s truly a notch above most other apps!  Every time Charlie opens this app, Olive says, “Woowwwwwww!!!”  Even though she can’t play Bugs and Buttons yet, she loves to watch her brother play.

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Do you have any iPhone or iPad apps for kids to recommend?  Let us know in the comments!