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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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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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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ShapeBuilder teaches an important lesson – sometimes there’s nothing more important in life than putting all of the pieces together. Granted, this probably isn’t what my daughter is thinking about while dragging puzzle pieces around – but it’s occurred to me more than once as we play with the app together. Like most successful kids apps, there’s a simple concept at the core of ShapeBuilder: put together a jigsaw puzzle by dragging the shapes around and then watch as they magically transform into a nicely animated image.

An empty puzzle

Puzzle In Progress

One great thing about this app – there’s an almost endless series of puzzles so it stays fresh over time. My two year-old daughter does struggle at times trying to drag the pieces into place — but that may just be because she’s a little young for this one. It requires fairly developed fine motor skills to get the pieces into place, as well as more advanced concepts of geometry to identify exactly where the pieces should go. There is a nice pay-off when things do fall into place — nicely animated images appear and you get audio congratulations for your success.

It’s no different, really, than a real-world puzzle – but for younger kids it’s probably important to be actively helping them thru this one because they can get frustrated if left to their own devices. All in all, this app is a great one to have around because I know my daughter will continue to learn from it as she grows.

Interested in checking it out? You can get it here.

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Animal Memory Match transports a simple kids game – Memory – and puts it on the iPhone. The game is populated with all sorts of cute animals, beginning with the home screen icon, a lovable little duck. The game includes four levels – at the easiest level, you have to match six cards, while at the hardest level you have to match thirty cards. Game play is straightforward – you just start-up the app and start touching the cards – they flip over in a smooth animation and remain flipped if you happen to match them. If you fail to match them, they flip back over and you can try again. There’s no timer, no score, no pressure, and no multiplayer aspects to the game – but that doesn’t stop the fun.

Animal Memory Match - Hard

Animal Memory Match - Easy

This app took a little while for my two-year old to figure out – but after we spent a couple of weeks playing it together, she is now fully in control of her own experience. In fact, the only thing that slows her down is stopping to exclaim “WOW” every time she matches a pair of cards. Although she has mastered the first three levels of the game, she does still like playing it with me so that she can learn the names of all of the animals. This app is definitely worth the $0.99 price tag and is among the apps that my daughter consistently revisits. Interested in checking it out for yourself?

You can get it here.

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