Top 20 Kids iPhone Apps
It’s easy to love the App Store, but I do have one frustration – it lumps in kids learning apps with all educational apps, including those aimed at goals such as teaching Korean to businessmen and logic to prospective lawyers. In my mind, this makes it harder for developers to share their kid-specific content, and harder for parents to find quality apps. Someday, we hope, Apple will find a way to display kids educational apps in their own category within the app store. Until then, we’ll keep you updated on great options when looking for learning apps just for the kids.
Top Kids iPhone Apps in the App Store
Wheels On Bus
1. Wheels On The Bus
Price: $0.99
Description: Created by parents, Wheels on the Bus is a fun, interactive musical book, based on the popular children’s song. Come aboard the bus to spin the wheels, open and close the doors, swish the wipers, pop some bubbles, make a dog bark, and much more!
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Get It From The Store
Cute Math
2. Cute Math
Price: $1.99
Description: Your little one can count baby penguins, pick the right amount of apples to put in a basket, move some happy birds around to solve addition problems, and drop apples off a tree to solve subtraction problems.
Review Coming Soon
Get It From The Store
Toddler Flashcards
3. Toddler Flashcards
Price: $0.99
Description: Toddler Flashcards has cards to teach children the names of animals, foods, things – as well as advanced stuff like the alphabet or numbers. Over 200 images, text in English, French and Spanish.
Review Coming Soon
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Voice Toddler Cards
4. Voice Toddler Cards
Price: $0.99
Description: A collection of talking flashcards. Cards speak in English and Spanish. You can also add your own voice to any flashcard.
Review Coming Soon
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Preschool Adventure
5. Preschool Adventure
Price: $0.99
Description: Contains simple activities parents can do with their toddlers: ocean colors, space shapes, monkey body, farm sounds, animal matching, dot-to-to numbers.
Review Coming Soon
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Word Magic
6. Word Magic
Price: $0.99
Description: A picture is shown and and kids select the missing letter for the word shown in the picture.
Review Coming Soon
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Five Little Monkeys
7. Five Little Monkeys
Price: $0.99
Description: Little Monkeys jump on the bed to music — kids can build counting and math skills by taking the monkeys on and off the bed. Interactive objects teach concepts like on/off, open/close and more.
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ShapeBuilder
8. Shapebuilder
Price: $0.99
Description: Shape Builder educates & entertains your little one with easy to move shapes that snap into place on top of silhouette puzzles. Real images are revealed when the puzzle is complete.
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Letter Tracer
9. Letter Tracer
Price: $0.99
Description: LetterTracer is an educational tool that helps preschoolers and other pre-reading children trace and paint letters and number shapes. The exposure to letters and numbers helps prepare children for reading and writing.
Review Coming Soon
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Pick A Letter
10. Teach Me Toddler
Editor’s Choice
Price: $0.99
Description: Teach Me Toddler helps toddlers learn letter names, letter phonics, numbers, shapes and colors.
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Suzy Dress Up
11. Suzy Dress Up
Price: $0.99
Description:Create and customize Suzy’s wardrobe and accessories with options including: hat, shoes, jewelry, purses, pets, glasses, hairstyle, eyes, mouth, skin color, wings, costumers and more.
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PopMath Basic Math
Price: $0.99
Description: Pairs of bubbles float on the screen and your goal is to pop each pair. For example, if one bubble says “7″ and another says “3+4″ simply touch one bubble, and then the other to pop them both.
Review Coming Soon
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Animal Memory Match
Price: $0.99
Description: Animal Memory Match is a fun filled memory match game for kids of all ages. Improve/test your children’s memory skills by matching pairs of cute and friendly animals.
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Best of Eye Spy
Price: $0.99
Description: A collection of children’s game and puzzles. Each puzzle consists of a picture with hidden objects. The challenge is to find the hidden objects within each puzzle.
Review Coming Soon
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Flash for Kids
Price: $0.99
Description: A collection of children’s game and puzzles. Each puzzle consists of a picture with hidden objects. The challenge is to find the hidden objects within each puzzle.
Review Coming Soon
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Letters A to Z
Price: $0.99
Description: Letters A to Z is a captivating set of animated flashcards designed to help toddlers learn the letters of the English alphabet in a fun and engaging way.
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Coloring Book
Price: $0.99
Description: An outline of a picture is displayed, and then you simply touch the appropriate color and paint in the picture with your fingertips.
Review Coming Soon
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abc PocketPhonics
Price: $0.99
Description: PocketPhonics teaches the letter sounds for all the letters in the alphabet. It also visually demonstrates how to write each letter.
Review Coming Soon
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Math Flash Cards
Price: $0.99
Description: Math Flash Cards is a fun to use math drill application that looks just like paper flash cards.
Review Coming Soon
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Lady Bug Tree
Price: $0.99
Description: A simple game: tap on a ladybug in the tree and drag it into the jar. Helps with fine motor skills, counting and number recognition.
Review Coming Soon
Get It From The Store
This list is based on iTunes App Store data as of early July ‘09. We agree with a lot of the titles on this list – many of these are truly great iPhone apps for kids — but we’re not completely convinced these are truly the best of the best. The nature of the app store makes it easy for some high-quality titles to slip through the cracks and hard for them to ever get rediscovered. On that note – are your kids using any great apps that you love that you don’t see on this list?
Let us know — we’ll be putting together a few other Top 20 lists in the coming weeks, but next time not based on sales.
Do share your favorites.
[Editor's Note: Descriptions listed in this article are adapted from the info provided by developers on iTunes. Our take on the apps can be found in the relevant reviews -- linked from above as available]
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An iPhone kids application you might want to check out is iStoryTime. It’s a library of narrated and illustrated kids books for the iPhone. There are 6 books available in the Apple AppStore today: http://www.istorytimeapp.com/appstore With new ones coming out every week.
Great for driving in the car, on the airplane, or at a restaurant waiting for the bill when the kids are going crazy.
Books are $1.99/ea from iTunes and can also be purchased on your phone from anywhere. Great for entertaining the kids in a guilt free way. All the wholesomeness of a book with the convenience of your phone.
Enjoy!
Website: http://www.istorytimeapp.com
On the AppStore: http://www.istorytimeapp.com/appstore
Great list! thank you!
My 3 year old son loves “Ladybug tree”, “Wheels on the Bus” and “Learn to Talk” which is not in your list but is a flash card game for toddlers and preschoolers. He likes to go through the colorful cards and listened to the words and repeat them. A great educational game for young children:
http://www.ilearntotalk.com/Products.html
Today I happened to stumble upon “ABC Animals – Talking Alphabet Cards for Kids” while looking for something to get my 2 year old started on reading. I’ve only had it for a few hours, but I love it, and more importantly, my son loves it! The pictures are active, fun, and most of all, ENGAGING for my kid.
We sat down and we played with this for 25 minutes, which is an amazing record for him! Great application! Highly recommended!
Website: http://www.innovativelanguage.com/products/ABCAnimals
App Store: http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=323265340&mt=8
Agreed — this is a great app for toddlers. It’s among the apps my daughter keeps coming back to – on the (crowded) list for a full review, so stay tuned for that…
I wrote this app a while back and was amazed at the feedback people age giving me. People are really pleased.
http://www.claywaregames.com/numbers-and-counting
Lucas,
To request a review, please email us at reviews(at)theikidsblog(dot)com
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Click on “Reviews” at the top of this page, for our perspective on what makes a good kids app. Thanks for your comment! Cheers,
-V
Photo Van Go is a new, fun photography paint app for kids. Color tint and paint art works from scratch or over photos. Bw version automatically converts color images to bw before colorizing for cool retro artistry. Nice set of paint tools.
http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=327018243&mt=8
A great list. A good drawing/painting app is great for kids too. My daughter uses one called Scribble, but I’m betting there are a lot of others out there. She seems to prefer free drawing to the more controlled coloring book type thing.
I personally just finished up our own little app for kids under 5. It’s a collection of 5 learning games about packing lunch for monkeys: colors, counting, letters, a matching game, and a puzzle game. It’s called Monkey Preschool Lunchbox: http://thup.com/preschool/
Would love to find out what you guys think, I’ll send along an email to your reviews address.
You’ll find a collection of sounding pictures for kiddies on http://www.Winzki.de
) For example: If you swipe, it even works when another finger rests on the display. My boy taught me that to keep his frustration low.
I made them for my little boy, and he insists on testing them over and over
These very nice apps have been specifically designed for the use by young children. (And you don’t need to blow into the phone
iTunes Link: http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewArtist?id=331553566
Of course, there’s a “Lite Winzki” for free, so you can try it out. More themes are “Farm Winzki”, “Home Winzki”, “Build Winzki”, “Cute Winzki” and possibly even more…
Hiya
I saw yer blog
Very well presented
In fact I have been looking for this for ages
theikidsblog.com is definitely on my bookmarks now.
Great effort keep up the good work !
John
[url=http://www.comparemobile.org/?p=289 [/url]
My grandchildren (ages 2 and 4) love Bumblebee Touchbook. It’s darling and is very effective at teaching word recognition.
Thanks for the site.
I’m a math teacher and a parent and I’ve been looking for apps that help kids learn concepts in mathematics and then practice them in fun ways. My current favorites for practice are ‘nine gaps’ and ‘zen of ten’.
I contributed to the design of a new app called “clock master” that was just released. I asked a company to build it because the other time telling apps didn’t have everything I was looking for.
Tim
Love this site! Thank you!
I’ve been looking through the posts for games or apps on the iPhone that would be fun and educational for my 7 year old boy.
Can you point me to a spot on your sight where you talk about apps that are aimed at elementary school kids? Second and third graders in particular?
He’s discovering all kinds of teen – oriented stuff on his own and I really need help pointing him in a more suitable direction, but we’ve tried a few of these suggestions and they are too young for him.
Many thanks,
Helen
Helen —
To be honest, much of our focus for this site has been on apps for the youngest of kids — mostly because that’s how old our children happen to be. That said, we can certainly do some reviews on apps aimed at kids your son’s age. Stay tuned for more there. That said – are there apps you’ve found that your son really loves that you do think are suitable? We’d love to start to put together a list of reader favorites here..
Helen,
We have also recently launched a FREE classic memory game called Mimic X (http://bit.ly/6wRiZZ). You can try that one on your son
But to the larger issue, we are working on widening our review net…in the meantime if you find a game or two that you like, you might try the “Customers also downloaded” options? If you get any traction in your search please feel free to share results!
Thank you for your feedback. Cheers,
Victor
A few really good kids learning iphone apps that we like are tozzle, iwritewords, and SimplyABC’s Plus. My four year old loves all of these and i love them b/c she’s learning and having fun! Thanks for other suggestions u have, keep them coming!
Another App – I wrote – your kids will like is Circus Find – http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/circus-find/id347180513?mt=8 –
This app has crazy cool graphics that your kids will love. The interaction with each scene is unique and kids will enjoy popping balloons and doing more with this app.
Enjoy.
Great list. Sure, i find it later. Just want to share my kid favorite app… thanks to the developer. Make our dinner more calmer
http://itunes.com/apps/tapdesk/tapcolors