We receive a lot of review requests and we look at a lot of apps. Every now and then we come across one and we just fall in love.

Nighty Night! HD is one of those apps for me. What’s so special about it, you ask? Well, our kids (iPad veterans at this point) just love it. The music is sweet, the visual production values are outstanding, and the concept is both engaging and intuitive. The app, you see, is an interactive bed time story that allows children to put a variety of animals to bed. The interface is elegant in its simplicity – just tap a room, and you see a close-up view of an animal getting ready for bed. Flick the lights off, and the animal goes to sleep. Sounds simple, but the kids adore it. Like any quality bedtime story, part of the value of Nighty Night! HD is that it actually helps my whirlwind of a two-year old realize that it’s time for bed. I’m clearly not the only parent that loves having something that helps put the kids to bed – Nighty Night! HD is currently the #1 paid iPad book app in the US Store.

Check out the video to see why Nighty Night! HD is a must-have bedtime companion for your digital wunderkids:

Then go grab Nighty Night@ HD for your iPad. You can get it in the App Store here.

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There’s a lot to be said for apps that excel at delivering kids an easy-to-use experience – and Good Shepherd HD does a great job of this. It features nice graphics and is well executed, but the real magic is the simplicity of the concept. The app has instant playability – simply help sheep find their way by using your finger to drag a path for them to walk back home. My three year old immediately grasped how the app works and soon enough was regularly asking to play “the sheep game”.

Good Shepherd HD includes five different levels, with additional sheep, flowers (collect them to score points), and obstacles. In addition, there is a game mode that allows you to play against the clock — which is a great way to extend the appeal of this app to older kids. In the future, it would be great to see the concept extended on the iPad with additional levels and depth added, but Good Shepherd HD is great as is — truly a hidden gem for kids within the app store. Interested? You can get it here.

Recommended for kids age 3-6.

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Currently, if you visit the App Store on your computer you will see an icon for “Apps for Toddlers” which directs you to Apple’s top 10 essential toddler apps:

• Monkey Preschool Lunchbox (read a review)
• Peekaboo Barn (read a review)
• Old MacDonald
• Toddler Teasers Quizzing
• Dora Saves the Crystal Kingdom
• Disney Fairies Fly
• Itsy Bitsy Spider
• Shape Builder (read a review)
• Preschool Adventure
• Curious George Coloring Book

There are certainly several good ones left out but this is a pretty solid list.  Thoughts?

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I’ve just returned from visiting family on the other side of the ocean where, among other things, I got to watch my toddler try to get the hang of Hungarian. I just loved watching her mind soak it all in. I’m sure many parents can relate to her first few words — “No”, “Uh oh”, and “Chocolate”. I’m also guessing that there are many parents out there excited about helping their kids prepare for the multilingual world of the future. To those parents, I can enthusiastically recommend OccupyBaby, a great kids iPhone app from Milobox.





OccupyBaby’s base farm theme allows toddlers to easily learn the names of farm animals in English, Spanish and French. It features lots of cute little animals in an easy-to-navigate scrolling barnyard interface. The app’s music is engaging and the interaction is easy, allowing even the youngest kids to play along. Just tap on an animal to hear a sound effect and hear the name of the animal spoken. Or slide your finger across the screen to scroll back and forth and reveal more animals. And if you really want to make things simple, you can put the app on an autoplay mode that will scroll thru all the animals one-by-one with no interaction required. That’s all there is to it — which keeps things manageable for the kiddies.





OccupyBaby is well-designed, easy-to-use, and – as I mentioned – a great tool to help young learners explore a few different languages. Once kids have learned the names of the animals in one of the languages, they can easily switch it up. By the time they are 3 they will be ready to identify all the barnyard animals they meet on your next Madrid-Paris-London road trip. Sound like a dream come true? Well, there’s an app for that. And you can get it here.

P.S. In case your road trip takes you to Budapest….rooster in Hungarian is “kakas”.

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Like many kids, I went through a phase where I LOVED dinosaurs. Well before Jurassic Park (the book!) I would spend hours flipping through dinosaur books and imagining what it might have been like to be an early mammal scurrying around in the shadows of the mighty T-Rex. If this sounds like your kid, then DinoMixer is the app that you’ve been looking for.





Put together by the creator of Zark.com (the first longform web comic), DinoMixer is a great way for younger kids to satisfy all of their dino-cravings. The app’s interface is straightforward — you can slide your finger across the screen horizontally to change backgrounds (there are six to choose from..) and slide your finger vertically to mix and match various dinosaur parts. If you like, for example, you can put the head of a Triceratops on the body of a Tyranosaurus and give it the tail of an Edmontosaurus. And, for kids who just like to see what happens, you can just shake to get a whole new combination of dino-parts.





The fun of mixing and matching the dinosaur parts is complemented nicely by the education you get when you correctly match the head, body and tail of a dinosaur – and its name is revealed. While this app may not be for all kids (my daughter is perhaps a bit too young for it and lost interest quickly..), it’s perfect for any youngster that is fascinated by dinosaurs. If that sounds like your kid, you can get the app here.

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If your kids loved Letters A to Z then ABC Animals – Talking Alphabet Cards for Kids would probably be a hit with them as well. It’s well-illustrated, easy-to-use and educational. The animations are also fun.

For each letter of the alphabet, a letter and an animal are shown. You can touch the letter to hear it spoken, touch the animal to hear its name spoken and easily flip though the full alphabet.
Without question, the production values on this app are fantastic – it’s just too bad that it exactly duplicates the approach of previous apps. With my daughter’s frequent requests for “new app”, it’s nice to have a bit of variety among the well-produced apps. And that’s the thing that’s really lacking with this app – the concept here is identical to Letters A to Z.

While I love the concept and the execution of this app, if you’ve already got one of the apps out there that’s virtually identical, you may not need this one. That said, if you don’t yet have an ABC animal flash card app for your toddler that they love, this one will likely be a hit. You can get it here.

Hope to see more original kids apps from these developers – they definitely know what they are doing.

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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!
Read a Review
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
Get It From The Store

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
Get It From The Store

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
Get It From The Store

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
Get It From The Store

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.
Read a Review
Get It From The Store

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.
Read a Review
Get It From The Store

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
Get It From The Store

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.
Read A Review
Get It From The Store

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.
Read A Review
Get It From The Store

PopMath Basic Math

Animal Memory Match

Best of Eye Spy

Flash for Kids

Letters A to Z

Coloring Book

abc PocketPhonics

Math Flash Cards

Lady Bug Tree

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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Let me start with this: Ella The Elephant has beautiful illustrations. The app is a kids book that centers around a lovable elephant and her animal friends.

Ella the Elephant

Let me also say this — Ella can sing. And scat. And so can her friends. As someone with a passion for music, it’s hard not to like an app that features some great jazz. Ella’s spirit throughout the story is also easy to admire: she rallies her buddies together to make some great music. Who can argue with that?

Ella and the band

Still, I do have some concerns about this app. First off, being forced to watch a couple of ads every time the app starts up just doesn’t sit well with me. I understand that this is common practice on many kids DVDs — but it’s not how I hope educational content will evolve as it transitions on to a mobile device. I also understand — as an app developer — the desire to recover the costs invested in producing content like this. It’s not easy, it’s not cheap, and it’s natural to want to cross-promote other products. But there’s a way to do that elegantly and this just feels too “hard sell” to me.

My other primary concern with this app is that it under-utilizes the potential of the iPhone platform. Interactivity is an unbelievably powerful way to engage kids in the learning process. Unfortunately, this app doesn’t take advantage of that opportunity — essentially it is a video packaged up as an app. Again — it is beautifully illustrated with great music — but in my mind, it’s a video – not an app. Which would be reasonable if I were searching for kids vids on YouTube, but this experience costs $2.99 in the app store. At that price point, I expect more.

Perhaps that is harsh — my daughter does like Ella. But she also likes it when we search for Cookie Monster on YouTube – and that’s free.

Bottom line? Try the lite version of the app first and see if this your sort of thing. You can get it free here.

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My 2.5 year old is not a big iPhone kid – he would much rather play with toys or dismantle random things around the house. My 13 month old, however, is definitely quick to grab at my phone and has an intuitive sense of how to slide panels and push buttons.

So yesterday we tried out the “Toddler Tapping Zoo” app, thinking it would be simple and fun, and because the icon graphic pulled me in.

My 3Gs iPhone seems to have pushed this app beyond its original capacity.  After the third animal the app froze and had to be rebooted. Upon returning to it, I noticed the sliding panels weren’t responsive to dragging but occasionally worked when we pushed the arrows.

I went back and re-read the description of the app, as well as some reviews, and was surpised to learn that the app has sounds. It says as much on the loading screen but I guess I was preoccupied with my son’s reaction to the app…

Overall this app is a great concept for really young ones, but not recommended unless the OS bugs are sorted out.

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Having studied Mandarin for over 10 years and having lived in Beijing for a few months, I have a special place in my heart reserved for an app that might help my daughter learn Chinese. That said, I am still blown away by the quality and the value of the new Chinese 4 Kids- Animal Kingdom app.

Chinese 4 Kids

The app has two different modes – learning and games. In the learning mode, you begin by selecting from among 26 animals.

Select An Animal To Learn The Chinese

Having selected an animal, you then get a screen that features an image of the animal, the Chinese character, the English word, and the Pinyin transliteration. All of these options offer interaction — selecting the English or the Pinyin produces the appropriate audio, while touching the animal image gives you a sound effect and selecting the character shows you how to correctly write the character. Simple and straightforward — but a great way to learn.

Learning to say and write Tiger in Mandarin

The learning mode could easily keep a kid (or an adult, for that matter..) occupied for quite some time — mastering all of them is no simple task. But there’s more to this app — once the kids are confident that they have some of the content mastered, they can then transition into game mode, which features three different games to test your knowledge. The first game, Dot-To-Dot, challenges you to match the image of an animal to the appropriate Chinese character.

Dot-to-Dot Game

Quick Pick is a bit easier — it asks you to select the correct Pinyin transliteration for the image of the animal. The game gives you 10 rapid-fire questions and then gives you a grade and a score based upon your performance.

Quick Pick Game

The final game is Flip Card which is a classic memory matching game that challenges you to demonstrate mastery of the correct English, Pinyin, and character for an image — and match them to each other by flipping cards. It’s a pretty standard memory game – but one that requires a solid knowledge base to succeed at.

And that’s why I love this app – it takes a challenging topic and reinvents the way the material can be learned so that it is both fun and educational. Kids may think they’re playing a game, but I guarantee that to succeed they will learn quite a bit along the way.

On a more personal note, this app is still a bit too much for my toddler right now. For slightly older kids, however, this app is a clear winner. My only real complaint is the music — it’s rather irritating and would almost be better without it. That said, I really do think this app is fantastic. Any parent looking to help their child get a jump start on learning a language that is sure to be critical over the next century has a great tool on their hands here. If that sounds like you, and you’ve got $0.99 to invest in your child’s future, you can get the app here.

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