Learning Touch Apps: Bob Books, FirstWords: Deluxe, and a Giveaway!

Reviews by Johnny Boo, age 5

Bob Books #1: Reading Magic
App developer: Learning Touch
Price: $1.99
Requirements: Compatible with iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad

Bob Books is great and it also is stupendous. My favorite part is when the pig digs in the mud. I would recommend this app to people who like Bob Books and to people who don't know how to read. I like Bob Books 100%.

LitLass's note: Johnny Boo has long been a fan of Bob Books. They were passed down to him from his big brother when he first started reading at 3. Two years later, and although he knows all of his first grade sight words, Johnny Boo recently insisted on buying Bob Books: Sight Words--First Grade. He still loves looking through the boxes and reading the books in order. That being said, he also loves Bob Books as an app, and even though he knows all of the words in the first set, he enjoys interacting with this app, especially since each page has four levels. Johnny Boo loves levels. I only wish he'd had this app as a toddler.

FirstWords: Deluxe
App developer: Learning Touch
Price: $.99 on 5/4/11; usually $4.99
Requirements: Compatible with iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad

FirstWords: Deluxe is an app about words. You have to spell words and sound them out. I like when you get to spell out words. My favorite words are the color words. I would recommend this to people who like words. I like this app infinity.

LitLass's note: FirstWords: Deluxe includes 174 words for animals, vehicles, colors, shapes, and at home. Children can play with letter hints turned on (see picture above) or off, as Johnny Boo usually does. Again, this would have been a great app to have a year or two ago while waiting for big brother to get out of martial arts or piano lessons, but Johnny Boo still loves dragging letters to spell out words. Words are as short as three letters or as long as eight.

And now for the giveaway.

To celebrate FirstWord's 1 millionth download, not only is app developer Learning Touch bringing down the price of all FirstWords apps (FirstWords: Deluxe, FirstWords: Animals, FirstWords: Vehicles, and more) to 99 cents for Wednesday, May 4, but they are also giving LitLad the opportunity to give away three promo codes for FirstWords Deluxe!

All you need to do is comment. I'll pick three random winners by the end of the day on May 4.

You can also like Learning Touch on Facebook, follow them on Twitter, or search for the hash tag #FirstWordsParty for more chances to win a FirstWords promo code (a list of all FirstWords apps can be found on the Learning Touch website). Good luck!

Oh, and comment. Now. Before the fourth of May is over.

Share a Story, Shape a Future: iPad/iPhone Apps That Promote Literacy

Share a Story, Shape a Future is a five-day online literacy event whose theme this year is "Unwrapping the Gift of Literacy." Today's topic, hosted by Danielle at There's a Book, is "Unwrapping Literacy 2.0." For my part, I'll be talking about some of the book and reading-related apps my children use and how they fit into our reading lifestyle.

First, though, a little background on us. We're a family of readers. I read to my boys (8 and 5) during breakfast every morning, and their dad and I read to them every night. The whole family (dad on weekends) has sustained silent reading time every afternoon. The 5-year-old doesn't have much trouble convincing me to take him to the library two or three times a week, and the first thing the 8-year-old does when he gets home from school is run to our stack of new library books. At school he has library time once a week and usually picks one book for himself and one for his little brother; his little brother is entering Kindergarten next year, and the thing he's most looking forward to: library time. The older one is always reading three or four chapter books or graphic novels at a time; the younger one likes to line up series books in order of publication date.We all love playing bookstore and library. And, as I write this, the older one is reading library books to the younger one (overheard from the other room: "You want me to read you another book? I'll read you whatever you want, even if it's a chapter book"). It's important to us that we see one another around books (and any form of the printed word, really), and we have books in every room.

Bottom line: In our house, the printed book isn't going anywhere.

But then there's the iPad. And the 8-year-old's iPod Touch. Here, they complement our print material, except in the case of the newspaper – we read the local paper on the iPad, and the 8-year-old reads his comics on Flipboard. Both boys have their favorite book and reading-related apps. We don't have a standalone e-reader, so sometimes when I think they're reading or doing something else educational, they're actually playing Cut the Rope or World of Goo (both fine games, when used in moderation). Or they're creating their own accounts on Amazon and adding Harry Potter books to their carts (don't get me started). But mostly, I think, they use the iPad and iPod Touch for good.

There are the books, of course, some of which we get via NetGalley, iBooks, and Kindle, and some of which we get from the App Store. We've reviewed a couple of our favorites: How Rocket Learned to Read and The Three Little Pigs. Here are a few of our other favorite bells-and-whistles book apps:

Bookster (free): Listen to a book called What If... (more stories coming soon) in read-along mode with words highlighted as they are read, or record yourself reading the story. Individual words highlight and are read aloud when tapped.

Dr. Seuss books ($2.99): Listen to the narrated story with words highlighted as they are read; read it yourself; or let it automatically read and turn pages. Words zoom up and are spoken when pictures are touched, and individual words highlight and are read aloud when tapped.

PopOut! The Tale of Peter Rabbit ($3.99): Listen to the narrated story with words highlighted as they are read, or read it yourself and hear individual words spoken with the tap of a finger. Features include pull-tabs, spin-wheels, and spring-mounted elements.

Toy Story Read-Along (free): Listen to the narrator, read it yourself, or record your own voice. The record-your-own voice feature is the 5-year-old's favorite in a book app – hearing his own voice gets him (even more) excited about reading.

Our favorite book apps that appeal to our obsessive, book-hoarding nature:

International Digital Children's Library (free): Features a collection of thousands of books in dozens of languages; you can also view the books online.

Tales2Go (30-day free trial): Gives you on-demand and unlimited access to more than 1,400 streaming audio stories for kids, including one of our favorite series, Ivy & Bean. This is now the 8-year-old's favorite app, and the 5-year-old loves searching for his favorite books.

And, finally, some reading-related apps that really challenge my boys to think and create:

BrainPOP (free): Delivers daily animated, captioned movies, covering the following subjects: science, social studies, English, math, arts & music, health, and technology & engineering. After watching the featured movie, children can test their comprehension with the accompanying interactive quiz. Thanks to BrainPOP, I might just have the only preschooler who knows how to use a semicolon (the featured topic on National Grammar Day).

Mad Libs (free; $3.99): Just like the Mad Libs books, except that this app features an interactive fill-in-the-blank type-pad for those kids who know their parts of speech and, like Mad Libs Jr. but interactive, a plethora of words from which to choose for younger kids.

Montessori Crosswords ($2.99): Helps kids learn reading, spelling, and writing with three levels of crossword play; displays colorful interactive visual effects that can be manipulated by the child every time a crossword is completed. For open-ended activities with letters, the standalone movable alphabet lets kids move letters around, resize them, and form words or sentences.

Story Patch ($4.99): Write stories for your children or have them write, illustrate, and read back their own stories. The app includes several themes, such as A Trip to the Zoo and Discovering a New Planet, for which kids answer a few questions to personalize an already existing story. Kids can also create stories from scratch. There are more than 800 illustrations to add to both themed and made-from-scratch stories. Both boys love this; the 5-year-old has been spending copious amounts of time creating stories and reading them back to us.

Timed Reading ($1.99): Readers in grades K-4 practice fluency by reading short, timed stories. Read our review to find out more.












Let's face it: Children need to read, to be read to, and to have access to reading material. All that matters is that they're excited about reading, whether it's print books, e-books, or reading-related apps (or, in our case, all three). As Maya Angelou said, "Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him."

Disclosure: The Share A Story, Shape A Future button was created by Elizabeth Dulemba.

iPad App Review: The Three Little Pigs

 Review by Johnny Boo, age 5

 













The Three Little Pigs
App developer: Nosy Crow
Price: $7.99 ($1.99 till end-of-day March 3); free lite version
Requirements: Compatible with iPad (will soon be available for iPhone and iPod Touch)

The Three Little Pigs is about a wolf coming in the neighborhood. The pigs were building their houses. And then the wolf couldn't blow down the brick house. I like The Three Little Pigs because it's good and wondrous and wonderful. I like when the wolf hides against the pigs' house in the very beginning. I like to flick the van up. I would recommend this app to kids who like little pigs and kids who are wolves for Halloween.

LitLass's note: I don't think my boys will ever tire of this app. They are of course familiar with the story of The Three Little Pigs, but they've never seen it like this. They can touch the pigs to make them talk, jump or spin; flick the wolf's van to make it jump or flip over (their favorite part); help the pigs build their houses; and help the wolf blow the houses down by blowing into the microphone. They can also tilt the iPad to see more of the scene and zoom in to reveal hidden details. Everything about this app (Nosy Crow's first, by the way) is, as Johnny Boo says, wondrous.

The Three Little Pigs is the first of at least four fairy tale apps from Nosy Crow. The others are Cinderella (summer 2010), Little Red Riding Hood (autumn 2011), and Goldilocks (early 2012). 

March 3 is World Book Day! To celebrate, Nosy Crow is dropping the price of The Three Little Pigs to $1.99 in the U.S. (£1.19 and 1.59 Euros) for one day only. 

Find it: full version, lite version

Disclosure: We received a promo code for this app from Nosy Crow at no cost in exchange for this review.

iPad App Review: How Rocket Learned to Read

 Review by Johnny Boo, age 5

How Rocket Learned to Read
App developer: Random House Digital, Inc.
Price (as of 2/23/11): $3.99 (limited-time price)
Requirements: Compatible with iPad



There's a little bird that startled Rocket and said, "There's no napping in class." Rocket listened to the bird read. Rocket learned to spell letters in the snow. I like to make Rocket move in the snow. The mud I like because I like to put mud on Rocket. I like to shake the mud off. Alphabet Drop is about you get to catch letters and then they go on Rocket's head. Bird's Words is wonderful and you get to pick words the lady says. I like this app because it's fateful and it's wondrous. I would recommend this app to kids who like dogs and words.

LitLass's note: Johnny Boo has had the book version of How Rocket Learned to Read since shortly after it came out; in fact, it was one of our first Books of the Week. We've had a renewed interest in the book now that we have the app (Johnny Boo demanded that I read it to him at bedtime the first night we had the app).

With text and illustrations by Tad Hills, the app not only tells Rocket's story (you can have the narrator read it to you or read it all by yourself), it also has two games–Bird's Words and Alphabet Drop. In Bird's Words you're given four sight words at a time, and you need to tap on the one voiced by the narrator. In Alphabet Drop you need to catch letters in alphabetical order, which might be a little difficult for preschoolers, but Johnny Boo is learning to think and tilt the iPad more quickly now that he's had some practice.

And, of course, since this is an app, there are plenty of opportunities for interactivity. Here are just some of them: There's a word of the day (today's is crab), which if tapped can be spoken by the narrator; there's a banner with the letters of the alphabet, which you can tap and then hear each letter sound and see and hear a word that starts with each letter; there's a snow scene in which you can use your finger to move Rocket to form letters (or use your imagination to make him go on adventures and tell your own Rocket stories, as Johnny Boo sometimes does); and there's a scene in which you can paint Rocket with mud and then shake the iPad to remove the mud and start all over again.

We've got a lot of book apps on our iPad, and I think if Johnny Boo were awake right now for me to ask him, he'd agree with me that this one is one of the best ones we've seen.

Disclosure: We won a promo code for this app on Twitter from Random House Books.

K12 Timed Reading – A Kid's Review

Review by Tintin, age 7

K12 Timed Reading
App developer: K12, Inc.
Price (as of 9/30/10): $1.99/full version; free version also available
Requirements: Compatible with iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad; requires iOS 3.1.3 or later

Timed Reading is a game that you read different stories on – thousands of them.* It only has five grades: Kindergarten, first grade, second grade, third grade and fourth grade. The game times you so you read faster and you can get a high score. It's a good game because it has reading, which I like. I like the stories because I learn a lot from them, like planets, geography and animals. I would recommend this game to people who like reading books.

* Editor's note: Not quite thousands, but more than 250, both fiction and nonfiction.

The above picture is from iTunes. The below show part of 2nd-grader Tintin's reading list:

 And part of pre-Ker Johnny Boo's:

LitLass's notes: We got this app when it was free, but we all love it so much, I think we'd pay full price if we had to. Tintin's 2nd grade class is working on timed reading every weekday for homework, but after the first week Ms. A. told Tintin he didn't need to work on it anymore. I'm pretty sure this app had something to do with that. Plus, you know it's a keeper when the boys are fighting over who gets to go first.

You can find this app and more information on it on iTunes. To learn about more apps for kids, check out App Friday on Moms With Apps.