Like all parents in the new millennium, you’re concerned about how much time your kids are spending in front of a screen each day. But when you’re waiting in a check-out line with a screaming toddler or driving to grandma’s house while a preschooler kicks the back of your seat in boredom, nothing beats a tablet or a smartphone to settle them down quickly.
Before you burn data streaming a kid-friendly movie, consider tapping on one of these entertaining apps that actually teach kids.
Apps For Toddlers
For toddlers, it’s all about play. The best apps harness engaging characters, simple instructions, and fun challenges in order to introduce colors, shapes, patterns, letters, sounds, and numbers.
- Busy Shapes. Perfect for toddlers practicing their fine motor skills, this pattern-recognition app is the screen version of good old shape-sorting blocks and puzzles.
- Eli Explorer. For toddlers who love free play, this app will feed their wanderlust as they swipe the screen to move their bunny tour guide through a world that identifies objects and speaks common phrases, with an option to hear them in a variety of languages.
- Bumblebee Touchbook. Interactive children’s books are a wonderful way to introduce your toddler to independent reading. In this app, a toddler can touch a word to hear it spoken as it comes to life.
- Intro To Math by Montessorium. Designed by Montessori educators, this app’s simple, subdued design is perfect for a child who’s easily overwhelmed by the loudness, bright colors, and quick motion of so many game apps.
Apps For Preschoolers
Your preschooler may just have mastered colors, numbers, and letters, but it’s never too early to think about moving them to the next level. Check out these apps to strengthen fundamental reading and math skills while keeping your child distracted from the candy aisle.
- Endless Alphabet. This colorful, interactive app doesn’t talk down to preschoolers. On the contrary, it uses big words to teach letter recognition, sounding-out skills, and spelling as well as multi-syllabic vocabulary.
- Balloony World. What isn’t entertaining about keeping a gorilla aloft with a bouquet of balloons? Scalable from age three to about six, this game teaches spelling and vocabulary skills.
- Bugs And Numbers. Got a kid who loves creepy-crawlies? The popping graphics on this app are the real draw, but the eighteen games will teach your preschooler to count and walk him through to higher levels, all the way to fractions.
- Leo’s Pad Enrichment Program For Preschoolers. Developed by education experts at Stanford, this app is a thoroughly immersive stop-action storytelling app involving Leonardo Da Vinci, Marie Curie, and Galileo. The app games enforce reading, math, and vocabulary skills while also introducing science and important historical figures.
Apps For Grade Schoolers
Kindergarten and the first few years of grade school form the foundation of your children’s education. This is when your child should master basic math concepts, hone word recognition and reading skills, and be introduced to science and the greater world. Check out the following apps that can help them along their way.
- GoldieBlox And The Movie Machine introduces animation and the basics of engineering to your kindergarten or early-grade school child.
- Ansel & Clair’s Adventures In Africa is a terrific alternative to videos and movies because it’s immersive as well as interactive. Puzzles and games introduce grade school-age children to the (often neglected) wonders of geography.
- The Dexteria Dots series of apps are simple, bright, fun ways for kids to learn basic math concepts as well as hone fine motor skills necessary to use screen-controlled computers.
- Touch And Write Phonics is perfect for an early reader ready to make the leap from sight words and sounding out to tricky subjects like shifting vowel sounds, letter blends, as well as di- and tri-graphs, all done in a goofy, fun, colorful way.
