With the summer about over and school quickly approaching, my daughter and I have been on the go and traveling in an effort to enjoy the last few weeks of warmth and sunshine. Daughter in tow, flights no longer involve finding a great book to get sucked in to or some juicy celebrity gossip magazines. Nowadays my focus is on what will keep her (and the other passengers) content enough so that we all make it through in one piece. Since a real cell phone holds a special source of interest for little ones, I figured this would be a good time to try out some new children’s apps.
In my search for educational, interesting and fun apps, I landed two great finds in ABCs 4 Kids by Madhan Premkumar and Rockus Animals by Rockus Studios, LLC. The ABCs 4 Kids app really kept my daughter’s interest despite it being so simple. I think this app just goes to prove that with toddlers, sometimes the simpler toys are the most captivating. As the name suggests, this app goes through the alphabet in a slideshow format with clearly displayed letters and audio at a timing interval you select. To my pleasant surprise, this app also performs slideshows of numbers, colors and shapes. My daughter and I have been working on these skills on our own, so it was exciting for her to listen to and see them in a new way. At the price of free, this app is a definite keeper that also works well in a pinch for car and restaurant entertainment.
Rockus Animals is just as educational but a little more interesting and fun. In the first mode, called the browse mode, Rockus Animals goes through a slideshow of animal photographs with matching sounds. The second mode, called the challenge mode, displays four different animal photographs with one sound and your child has to select the animal that correctly goes with the sound. In both modes, the photographs are really great and eye-catching and the sounds made my daughter laugh every time. While this app isn’t free, the $0.99 purchase price was a small drop in the bucket for the smile on my daughter’s face.
All in all, the newness of the apps in conjunction with the novelty of playing with Mommy’s phone proved to be a definite crowd-pleaser. Both apps are great distractions for a toddler while still providing some educational value. I hate always turning to the DVD player when we are on the road, so the apps were a nice change of pace for her and for me.
