I’ve reviewed the Duck Duck Moose Apps for the iPad in my “iPad apps for young kids” post and it’s no secret that I love them. I think they are are the best educational apps you can get for kids. And just when you think they’ve brought out the best one, they bring out another that’s even better.
They are American – so there are a few little annoyances, but we work around them in the main.
Well this week they are running a back to school event with their two latest apps discounted by 50% for a couple of days.
If you don’t have them yet, I’d recommend them both. The little one has learnt so much from both of these apps. So the details are:
Hop aboard Word Wagon to learn about letters, phonics, and spelling! Word Wagon includes more than 100 words (including 44 Dolch sight words) in 7 categories. (Ages 1-7)
Winner of the Children's Technology Review Editor's Choice Award
Come play at the park, and learn to count, add, subtract, sort and more! Park Math introduces early math concepts to children in Preschool and Kindergarten (Ages 1-6).
Winner of the Children's Technology Review Editor's Choice Award, Parent's Choice Silver Award, iLounge Kids App of the Year Award
Even better news for me (I already have all the Duck Duck Moose Apps!) is that they will shortly be launching a new puzzle app. I can’t wait!
*This is not a sponsored post. I already had all the apps. Duck Duck Moose just emailed me and let me know about their promotional offer.
10th August, 2011: Added Learn the Animals and Learn Fruit and Vegatables
6th August, 2011: Added My Playhome
14th June, 2011: Added Tati’s Hotel
7th May, 2011: Added iRewardchart
29th March, 2011: Added Duck Duck Moose Word Wagon
1st December, 2010 : Added Duck Duck Moose video
24th September, 2010 : Updated to add Duck Duck Moose Park Math App
Ok I thought I would share with you the applications that I have on my the little one's iPad that work really well. She has been using the iPad since before she was 2. She was 3 in July 2011.
Ratings explained
You’d be mad if you didn’t buy this app
Really good and worth buying
Ok app, may have short term interest
Not great
Don’t bother
The DuckDuck Moose Apps
probably the best but an American company so we get Zee not Zed and other such Americanisms. This is a compilation video they made. The little one is at 5:29
Bus, Itsy Bitsy, Old Mac - These are all interactive applications for the 3 classic nursery rhymes. On each screen you have different things to poke that respond in different ways. Each time you change to the next screen the next verse of the nursery rhyme is sung out loud. She loves them although she is getting bored with Old Mac and Bus because they are a bit too simple. The rely on you tapping an arrow to move to the next screen. On Itsy Bitsy if you tap on the spider he climbs up the water spout and takes you to a different screen. It also has a squirrel that fetches nuts and counts as it goes which she loves
Fish School - We both love this app because it's the most interactive and educational at the same time. It does counting, the alphabet, shapes, colours, matching, the alphabet songs and a couple of little games all done in fish! Tapping takes you to the next letter, or number, or picks a colour/shape etc. The little one has nearly learnt the Alphabet song from it
Baa Baa - This is the latest nursery rhyme application from Duck Duck Moose and it is the best so far. It is far more interactive and moving between screens is away from simple clicking on arrows. The little one has it as her new favourite
Word Wagon – this is the latest App. It teaches spelling including phonics and numbers. The little one took to this app straight away and it is perfect for her right now because she is desperate to be able to read her books.
Park Math - This app is all around teaching them numbers. It covers simple counting, adding and subtracting. It's another great addition and is really helping the little one enhance her counting which is already pretty good from 1-10. If you only get this and Fish School then you have everything you need to teach them numbers, shapes, colours and the alphabet!
Clicky Sticky
A virtual sticker album. Choose from a sea scene, aeroplanes, space, wild animals or good old fashioned dress up dolls. She kind of likes it. She doesn't like the dress up dolls one as much as I expected and things don't "snap" into place so it gets a bit chaotic. She goes into there quite often but only spend a few seconds playing with it.
Peekaboo barn
She really loves this one. You click on the barn doors and out pops an animal. A voice says it's name and a noise is played for the animal. Worth moving on from the free version to the full version and paying for it because the free version has only a couple of animals and the full version has loads. It also has it in Spanish so you can learn a new language at the same time
Talking Animals (Carl, Larry, Hippo)
A must for an i-thingy owner. You prod them and tickle them and they giggle and yell. If you are on anything but the iPod Touch they take input from the speaker and repeat it back to you. Hours of fun this one. Definitely one of my her favourite apps. They have also taught her to shout (can be useful if they get lost) and really helps develop language because they hear what they say repeated back at them. Larry (a bird), Tom (a cat), Harry (a hedgehog) and Hippo have extra buttons to allow you to interact with them and Larry even has a keyboard that you can play to make him tweet. The little one loves the lightning bolt on the Larry app! Harry is the only one that repeats what you say in a similar voice to yours. I find these ones worth paying for to get the extras. They all have a video camera icon which is really annoying because when you press it you can send a recording of what you've done via email etc. She presses it all the time!
The colouring apps
I got a few different ones but she only likes one of them
DoodleBuddy - Use your finger as a brush to draw and paint. She likes this one. On the iPod touch it's all geared for online collaboration so has loads of annoying screens both to get in and from the menu bar. The iPad version is far more polished and she really loves "drawing". You shake your device to wipe the page clean and start again and she really likes that! It has a gallery of standard pictures which you can paste into your document lots of times and they each make a little noise. You can then smudge them or scribble over them. We spend a lot of time drawing.
Colouring fun - You have outlines, choose a colour and tap to fill in. She really is far less interesting in this than I expected and would not bother with it again.
Tozzle
This is brilliant and her new favourite app. It is basically your old fashioned "fits shapes onto a board" toy made current in an app. There are a range of different scenes from shapes, animals and their names, snow scenes to whatever. Basically about 30 in total I think. You pick up a piece from a box in the top right and drag it into the corresponding black outline shape in the scene. It is challenging enough to make her think but not so difficult she get's frustrated and gives up. It has noises that go with it to for that extra edge.
Here is the little one demonstrating how it works:
This is my favourite app so far. She likes it but not as much as Tozzle. It's the same basic idea but what you are doing is putting letter blocks into placeholders that spell out an animals name under the picture of that animal. Once more she impressed me with her ability to do this one. Like with Tozzle, you drag the letters and in this case it says them as you drag and place them. I think this is a great way of teaching letters and spelling and she is picking up on the way letters are said really well from it. It has 3 different levels. On the first level it put's placeholder's in for where the letters should go. On the others it doesn't so they have to know how to spell!
Kids Songs
Not sure about this one. It plays the classic nursery rhymes with the words and little animations. The animations bear no relationship to the songs which is annoying. It is American voices again which is also annoying. She goes into it a lot but rarely listens to the song all through because there just isn't enough for her to do in there.
Puzzles
It is a 3 by 3 grid with different parts of an animals face in each box. You tap a box to rotate it and the goal is to fill the grid with the same animal. At first she found it tricky to grasp mainly because the boxes are so sensitive she was always accidentally brushing one underneath her hand when she is pressing another. Eventually though she really got to grips with it and now loves it.
I Hear Ewe
There are a number of themed screens (animals, vehicles etc) and when you tap on an icon it zooms in, says the name and plays a sound associated with it. This should be really good but she is not really interested in it.
Animatching
This is the classic card game where you can turn over 2 cards at a time and have to match pairs as quickly as you can. Each card displays an animal and plays a sound for that animal when you tap on it. There are 3 different levels with increasing numbers of cards in this. She loves this and impresses the hell out of me with her ability to complete the grid at only 2 years old.
Smacktalk
This was recommended to me by good friend Pat over at Justanotheriphoneblog and is very similar to the Talking animals series.
There is a Gerbil (the little one calls him Mousey) a puppy, a kitten and tiny dog. They repeat back what you say in a silly voice. Unlike the Talking animal apps you can change the pitch of the voice with a pinch. The numbers 1-5 across the bottom have some pre-recorded sounds on them (burping and farting noises which make the little one giggle loads) and you can record a new sequence on each on by holding them down for a second until they beep. This is great. I have recorded the alphabet song on one and counted to 10 on another. It's not free but it is cheap at 59p so I definitely recommend this and I think it will carry on entertaining as she gets older too.
iWrite
This was recommended by RedTedArt and it is, quite frankly, brilliant. When you first run it it looks quite complicated and I didn't think my 2 year old would ever get it.
But it is actually quite simple. The idea is that you drag the crab through the circled numbers in the right sequence and it teaches you to draw letters. When you complete it successful, the letter from the top left drops to the bottom of the screen and you can tilt the iPad to get it into a swirly black hole thing. The little one loves doing that. It also says the letter out loud. It teaches them a combination of numbers and letters and also teaches lower case (or baby letters) and uppercase. It amazes me how effective it is and although it's frustrating for her at times she generally finds it fun. She is learning very quickly off it. There is a lite version which is free and I quickly paid for the full version.
iReward Chart
I was talking about my new reward board for the little one on Twitter when a company called iRewardchart offered to let me check out their iPhone App for free. I figured it would be interesting to put it on the iPad
This App is only an iPhone version right now so doesn’t look great on the iPad but here is a summary of what I like and don’t like about it (by the way I think it is targeted at slightly older kids than the little one)
Like
Can have multiple kids
‘bank and shop’ concept of stars building up to points and an inventory of what those points can buy you. You can then spend them and it zero’s it off again.
Easy and flexible to build in the sort of tasks you can earn stars for
Easy and flexible to allocate stars
Dislike
I don’t think Apps for this are visible enough through the day. This is not any fault of iRewardchart just my opinion of these apps. I like a board on the wall (and I am a geek who usually prefers the technology oiption!)
I didn’t like the 1st screen being to select the kid. I would have liked the days reward view as my first screen
The next view after selecting your kid is a weekly view. Again I would like a daily view and the week started on Sunday which I thought was weird
I didn’t see any parental protection. Even though the little one is a bit too young for this app at 2 3/4 years, she would easily go in and play with it and add stars and change settings. There is a lock option apparently but I haven’t had a chance to check it out yet
I see you can link with FB, Twitter etc. Not sure why I would want to? But then I think is due to the cultural differences between the UK and the US where it was written!
Tati’s Hotel
I was sent a code for this app to review it. I’ve never heard of Tati or her hotel and not sure if I should have to be honest. But it’s an app for kids so I gave it to the little one to have a go at. It is targeted at age 4+
You switch the blocks to make the picture. You don’t know what the picture should look like so it is asking quite a lot of the little one’s.
At first the little one didn’t get it. But then she asked me to do it and loved watching me. The grids get increasingly bigger and so more difficult. After watching me a few times she grabbed the iPad back and started doing it herself. She can now easily manage the 2x2 and 3x3 grids and is working her way to the bigger one. It’s a simple game. It time you and awards a rosette for faster times which the little one also like. There is not much depth to the game but when you are talking a nearly-3 year old there doesn’t really need to be!
My Playhome
- The review for this app can be found on iPadinsights where I now blog about iPad apps. It's good, check it out
Learn the Animals
Learn Fruit and Vegetables
The review for this app can be found on iPadinsights where I now blog about iPad apps. Very educational - worth getting.
Little Farmer
The review for this app can be found on iPadinsights where I now blog about iPad apps. A very simple app that it is not really worth spending the money on. 5 –10 minutes of entertainment max
Punflay Apps
The review for this app can be found on iPadinsights
Word Wall
Eek and Slo
Nursery Rhymes for Tots
The Punflay apps are a must buy for all ages of kids. They are entertaining and fun, whilst at the same time being highly educational. There is amazing depth to each app and the animations are lovely.
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I will keep this updated as I get other recommendations that we really like.
I am a geek. It is a big responsibility. It means people often ask me for advice on new technology and gadgets. This means that *sigh* I have to buy all the latest technology so I can speak authoritatively on the matter. Pressure eh?
So my latest gadget is an iPad. Supposedly the "must-have" gadget of all time. So what do I think?
Well firstly let me just clarify - I am not a fan of the iPhone but I do love the apps. I got an iPod Touch which allowed me to play all the apps and I love it. So here we go with the plus and minus - at the end you will see my conclusion
Positives
It's a sexy, head turning device (told you I was a geek)
It is slim and has a great quality screen
It has a great battery life
Unlike the iPhone and iPod touch, the touch keypad is very usable because it's bigger
The apps are great and it has all the benefits of integration with the AppStore as the other devices
It is very convenient to have on your lap while you watch TV, or on a plane or train.
The speakers are great - good quality and nice and loud.
Negatives
It doesn't support the latest version of Flash because of Adobe and Apple falling out. This hits a lot of websites. For example we can go to the CBeebies website but can't play anything because they need Flash. This may also affect things like TV playback
It doesn't have a camera. Why not? It's supposed to be a fully web enabled device and they clearly have the technology from the iPhone
I did have a problem with the security settings. I changed the security protocol on my router to WPA and that fixed it but this is not easy for a lot of people to do.
It doesn't appear to charge off the cable. It has to be physically plugged in.
It has no USB ports so if you want to install anything off a CD or add an external device it has to be from Apple as an approved accessory.
It doesn't even support the Homeshare feature on iTunes so it functions more as a giant iPhone/iPod Touch than a sexy touch screen computer.
My advice
It is a great toy for a gadget freak like me who has lots of computers and gadgets. If you want a bigger iPod Touch then this is the device for you.
If you want it as your primary device then the limitations are too many to make it workable. Blogging, shopping and generally web usage could be a challenge. This will probably be sorted in the next generation.
24th September, 2010 : Updated to add Duck Duck Moose Park Math App
==========
Ok I thought I would share with you the applications that I have on my the little one's iPad that work really well. I keep on updating it and she is now just over 2 years old and I have 2 screens of apps for her!
1. The DuckDuck Moose Apps -probably the best but an American company so we get Zee not Zed and other such Americanisms. This is a compilation video they made. The little one is at 5:29
Bus, Itsy Bitsy, Old Mac - These are all interactive applications for the 3 classic nursery rhymes. On each screen you have different things to poke that respond in different ways. Each time you change to the next screen the next verse of the nursery rhyme is sung out loud. She loves them although she is getting bored with Old Mac and Bus because they are a bit too simple. The rely on you tapping an arrow to move to the next screen. On Itsy Bitsy if you tap on the spider he climbs up the water spout and takes you to a different screen. It also has a squirrel that fetches nuts and counts as it goes which she loves
Fish School- We both love this app because it's the most interactive and educational at the same time. It does counting, the alphabet, shapes, colours, matching, the alphabet songs and a couple of little games all done in fish! Tapping takes you to the next letter, or number, or picks a colour/shape etc. The little one has nearly learnt the Alphabet song from it
Baa Baa - This is the latest nursery rhyme application from Duck Duck Moose and it is the best so far. It is far more interactive and moving between screens is away from simple clicking on arrows. The little one has it as her new favourite
Park Math - This app is all around teaching them numbers. It covers simple counting, adding and subtracting. It's another great addition and is really helping the little one enhance her counting which is already pretty good from 1-10. If you only get this and Fish School then you have everything you need to teach them numbers, shapes, colours and the alphabet!
2. Clicky Sticky - a virtual sticker album. Choose from a sea scene, aeroplanes, space, wild animals or good old fashioned dress up dolls. She kind of likes it. She doesn't like the dress up dolls one as much as I expected and things don't "snap" into place so it gets a bit chaotic. She goes into there quite often but only spend a few seconds playing with it.
3. Peek Barn (Peekaboo barn) - She really loves this one. You click on the barn doors and out pops an animal. A voice says it's name and a noise is played for the animal. Worth moving on from the free version to the full version and paying for it because the free version has only a couple of animals and the full version has loads. It also has it in Spanish so you can learn a new language at the same time
4. Talking Carl/Hippo/Tom/Larry/Harry
- a must for an i-thingy owner. You prod them and tickle them and they giggle and yell. If you are on anything but the iPod Touch they take input from the speaker and repeat it back to you. Hours of fun this one. Definitely one of my her favourite apps. They have also taught her to shout (can be useful if they get lost) and really helps develop language because they hear what they say repeated back at them. Larry (a bird), Tom (a cat), Harry (a hedgehog) and Hippo have extra buttons to allow you to interact with them and Larry even has a keyboard that you can play to make him tweet. The little one loves the lightning bolt on the Larry app! Harry is the only one that repeats what you say in a similar voice to yours. I find these ones worth paying for to get the extras. They all have a video camera icon which is really annoying because when you press it you can send a recording of what you've done via email etc. She presses it all the time!
4. The colouring apps -I got a few different ones but she only likes one of them
DoodleBuddy - Use your finger as a brush to draw and paint. She likes this one. On the iPod touch it's all geared for online collaboration so has loads of annoying screens both to get in and from the menu bar. The iPad version is far more polished and she really loves "drawing". You shake your device to wipe the page clean and start again and she really likes that! It has a gallery of standard pictures which you can paste into your document lots of times and they each make a little noise. You can then smudge them or scribble over them. We spend a lot of time drawing.
Colouring fun - You have outlines, choose a colour and tap to fill in. She really is far less interesting in this than I expected and would not bother with it again.
From the comments on this post I have since also bought a few additional apps which are definitely must haves.
5. Tozzle - This is brilliant and her new favourite app. It is basically your old fashioned "fits shapes onto a board" toy made current in an app. There are a range of different scenes from shapes, animals and their names, snow scenes to whatever. Basically about 30 in total I think. You pick up a piece from a box in the top right and drag it into the corresponding black outline shape in the scene. It is challenging enough to make her think but not so difficult she get's frustrated and gives up. It has noises that go with it to for that extra edge.
Here is the little one demonstrating how it works:
6: Animals (First words:animals) -This is my favourite app so far. She likes it but not as much as Tozzle. It's the same basic idea but what you are doing is putting letter blocks into placeholders that spell out an animals name under the picture of that animal. Once more she impressed me with her ability to do this one. Like with Tozzle, you drag the letters and in this case it says them as you drag and place them. I think this is a great way of teaching letters and spelling and she is picking up on the way letters are said really well from it. It has 3 different levels. On the first level it put's placeholder's in for where the letters should go. On the others it doesn't so they have to know how to spell!
7. Kids Songs -Not sure about this one. It plays the classic nursery rhymes with the words and little animations. The animations bear no relationship to the songs which is annoying. It is American voices again which is also annoying. She goes into it a lot but rarely listens to the song all through because there just isn't enough for her to do in there.
8. Puzzles - It is a 3 by 3 grid with different parts of an animals face in each box. You tap a box to rotate it and the goal is to fill the grid with the same animal. At first she found it tricky to grasp mainly because the boxes are so sensitive she was always accidentally brushing one underneath her hand when she is pressing another. Eventually though she really got to grips with it and now loves it.
9. I Hear Ewe -There are a number of themed screens (animals, vehicles etc) and when you tap on an icon it zooms in, says the name and plays a sound associated with it. This should be really good but she is not really interested in it.
10. Animatching -This is the classic card game where you can turn over 2 cards at a time and have to match pairs as quickly as you can. Each card displays an animal and plays a sound for that animal when you tap on it. There are 3 different levels with increasing numbers of cards in this. She loves this and impresses the hell out of me with her ability to complete the grid at only 2 years old.
11. Smacktalk - This was recommended to me by good friend Pat over at Justanotheriphoneblog and is very similar to the Talking animals series.
There is a Gerbil (the little one calls him Mousey) a puppy, a kitten and tiny dog. They repeat back what you say in a silly voice. Unlike the Talking animal apps you can change the pitch of the voice with a pinch. The numbers 1-5 across the bottom have some pre-recorded sounds on them (burping and farting noises which make the little one giggle loads) and you can record a new sequence on each on by holding them down for a second until they beep. This is sort of great. I have recorded the alphabet song on one and counted to 10 on another. The reason it's only sort of great is because it's really easy to accidentally re-programme the buttons. I had to re-record the alphabet song 5 times in the space of 5 minutes because the little one accidentally wiped it. She wasn't happy. She was enjoying it! It's not free but it is cheap at 59p so I definitely recommend this and I think it will carry on entertaining as she gets older too. Here is the video of her using it. I'm afraid the sound is very quiet for some reason so it's hard to hear it. You can see her giving "mousey" (the gerbil) a big kiss though!
12. iWrite - This was recommended by RedTedArt and it is, quite frankly, brilliant. When you first run it it looks quite complicated and I didn't think my 2 year old would ever get it.
But it is actually quite simple. The idea is that you drag the crab through the circled numbers in the right sequence and it teaches you to draw letters. When you complete it successful, the letter from the top left drops to the bottom of the screen and you can tilt the iPad to get it into a swirly black hole thing. The little one loves doing that. It also says the letter out loud. It teaches them a combination of numbers and letters and also teaches lower case (or baby letters) and uppercase. It amazes me how effective it is and although it's frustrating for her at times she generally finds it fun. She is learning very quickly off it. There is a lite version which is free and I quickly paid for the full version.
============================================
I will keep this updated as I get other recommendations that we really like.
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