- App Name: Explore The Animal Kingdom
- Developer: Mathieu Brassard
- Platform: iOS, (iPad, iPhone)
- Cost: $1.99
- Rating: 5 Dinosaurs
- Click here to win a copy of this app for yourself
My son, Bowie, is 18 months old and Animals is his favorite iPad app so far. We have only tried a couple, but this one is thesimplest and has taught him the most.
Animals is essentially a flash card app
It contains a number of animal photos arranged alphabetically from Alligator to Zebra. When the app opens you choose english or French then are presented with a grid of all the animal images when holding the iPad in landscape mode. you can scroll through the grid and play each animal sound by touching the animal. When you turn to portrait mode you get a single animal image.
They are good quality images and most are distinct and easy to identify. Each image has the name of the animal printed at the bottom and if you touch the word, a voice, either male or female, will speak the name. We don’t use this feature much since he never uses the app by himself yet. There is also an option to switch to the French language version when things get to easy.
Interactivity
Touching the picture will play the noise the animal makes. This is Bowie’s favorite part and I think an important part of developing the memory of the animals because if gives the child 3 points of reference, or context around the animal. For several of the animals, Bowie remembered and could deliver the sound an animal made rather than the name of the animal.
Many of the animals have difficult to imitate sounds. Which is ok, I do my best to approximate it and Bowie does his best to approximate me. Many have impronounceable sounds, like the Crane and the Orca. Sometimes Bowie just says, “noise” when he hears it.
Cost
There is a free version and a paid version. The free version has the same functionality, but fewer animals. I suggest you use the free version until your kid can name half the animals, or you can tell they have the attention span for more. The paid version is well worth it.
Experience
Bowie loves this app and asks for it by name. He has the attention span for at least two run-throughs of all the animals and after about 6 months of practice can name about half of the 100 animals!
Here are some videos that show us using the app and how a 18 month old can navigate it and have fun with it.
From my experience, this app is good for kids 1 to 2 and 1/2 years in the english version, then maybe another year or two if you switch over to French. You could also make up some games where you play the sound and have them guess the animal without looking at the image. Or start to learn spelling the same way. If you haven’t played any games like this with your toddler check it out.
Mathieu Brassard has several other iOS apps geared towards kids including:
- EducaFood (food flash cards)
- EduVroom (vehicle flash cards)
- Discover Musical Instruments (instrument flash cards)
I have not tried these yet, but based on our experience with Discover The Animal Kingdom, I’m sure we’ll love them. I’m sure you will too, so I’m going to get one Gizzard Stone Reader all of them. Just click here to enter the drawing.
What do you think? What flash card type apps do you and your kid like?
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