Best Kids Apps For iPhone & iPad 2016/2017

 

 

Awesome apps for kids, children of all ages, toddlers and babies to encourage learning, creativity and fun....

Best iPhone & iPad apps for kids: Babies and toddlers

We'll start with a couple of suggestions for the very youngest age group. These are aimed more at parents than the babies themselves, of course, and we wouldn't recommend much screen time for the very young ones.

Best iPhone and iPad apps for babies:

1.  Baby Feeding Log

• Free (View Baby Feeding Log in the App Store)
• Rated 4+ (for parents!)

The lives of small babies are entirely structured around the twin cycles of eating and sleeping, and understanding these cycles (which will be specific to your child) can make the living hell that is the first three months of parenthood slightly less hellish. Why is she crying? Ah, it's been nearly three hours since the last feed. Or she only took 130ml last time. Or she only took 130ml the last three times, and maybe she's poorly. And so on.If you're breast-feeding then things are complicated in a different way, because you no longer have access to the volumes of milk consumed - at which point timing the feed becomes critical. You will also want to remember which breast you used last time, and if that seems like the sort of thing that's easy to remember then you haven't got up for a feed at 3 in the morning.
This app is a simple, free and one-hand-optimised way to keep track of these figures and timings (despite the name it covers sleep and 'diapers' as well as feeding), and while it isn't perfect, we strongly recommend getting either this or something like it.

  

2.  Sleepy Sounds

• Free
  
• Rated 4+

Familiar sounds and songs can act as a valuable trigger, helping to indicate to baby when it's time to sleep. (And if only it were as simple as that sentence made it sound!) In time you're likely to end up with a dog-eared musical soft toy that adds touch and smell to the ensemble of familiarity, but when starting out or visiting family, having an emergency measure up your sleeve (or on your phone) can be a lifesaver.
Sleepy Sounds is quite limited, with just four white noise options (the tumble dryer is particularly restful) and three sets of nature sounds to choose from - we'd steer clear of the somewhat abrasive lullaby selection. But it's free and helps to ease one of the more desperate situations faced by beginner parents: bedtime, with rabbit nowhere to be found.

 

3. Blackboard Madness: Math

• Free
• Rating: 4+

Got a maths-whizz child who wants a challenge? Blackboard Madness is a set of fast-paced, quick-fire maths challenges, taking in addition, subtraction, division, multiplications, algebra, and > (more than) and < (less than) questions.
This is a great test of mental maths skills, logic thinking and reaction. It's like Live Mathletics on speed. You have to slash the correct answers before they drop off the blackboard. There are kung fu sound effects to make you feel like a martial arts maths black belt. Don't give this to a child just starting out on maths as the pace is pretty frenetic, but mental maths reaction speed is a great skill to teach more experienced maths students.

 As with any decent challenge game there are high scores and player statistics to track performance, achievements and badges as rewards.

 

4.Bloom

• Price: £2.99
• Age: 4+

There are tools for making music and others that are more about experimenting with sound. Bloom is an iPhone take on the latter, a collaboration between software designer Peter Chilvers and musician Brian Eno that enables you to explore generative audio composition. That probably all sounds a bit highbrow for kids, but it really isn't in practice. Essentially, you tap on the screen to play a note, which eventually loops. Keep tapping and a composition appears. It's a beautiful, relaxing app, and simple enough that even a two-year-old can grasp the basics of how it works.

 

5. Dinosaur Park Math

• Price: 79pounds
• Rated 4+

Dinosaur Park Math is a fun way for children to learn addition and subtraction from 0 to 20. Kids need to answer sums correctly in order to chisel away at rocks that hide dinosaur fossils within them.
Kids can learn dinosaur facts while they're learning maths, too. There are also some less educational but equally fun games to play within the app.
We'd suggest there's a risk that kids will get into the habit of guessing, though, as there are no major consequences to getting the questions wrong.
There's a free version of the app too, so you can try it out and decide whether your kids will enjoy it before upgrading to the paid version.

6.Dino Tim

• Price: Free
• Made for ages 3-6

Dino Tim is a great way for younger children to get to grips with colours, shapes and their first words. Dino Tim's family has been abducted by witches, and kids have to solve various educational puzzles in order to save them. The game involves solving colour and geometric shape puzzles, as well as running, flying, jumping and even a little bit of magic.
The aim of the game is to teach kids to recognise basic geometric shapes, as well as to learn about colours and even their first words. The game has been fully translated into a number of languages (French, Spanish and Italian to list a few) which provides your child with a great opportunity to learn a foreign language in a fun way, from a young age.

 7.Doodle Critter Math: Shapes

• Price: £2.29
• Rated: 4+

Doodle Critter Math: Shapes teaches your children basic shapes such as triangle, rectangle, square, hexagon and circle. Kids learn to draw different shapes by touching the 'critters' (small animals). A range of tasks including sorting, matching and memory games, make learning fun. Doodle Critter Math is designed for kids aged three to five and is another great way that young children can use the technology on the iPad to learn basic skills.

 

8. Elephant Art! Painting Room

• Price: Free/£2.29
  
• Made for 5 and under

It's immediately clear this isn't a typical art app when you prod a button and an elephant's massive foot crushes a banana, splattering it across a canvas on the wall. Further buttons provide additional destructive capabilities, obliterating all manner of household objects that magically become transformed into paint and flung at the artwork, creating a kind of abstract masterpiece.
It's all very silly and a world away from virtual crayons, but the developer notes that is the point. Elephant Art isn't about recreating the real world, but celebrating colors, magic and art.

 9.Endless Alphabet

• Price: £4.99
• Made for 5 and under

Although more conventional than Metamorphabet, listed elsewhere in this feature, Endless Alphabet proves that dialling down the surreal doesn't mean an app about letters has to be boring. On the contrary, Endless Alphabet is a lot of fun as you choose a word, watch the letters scatter, and drag them back into place.
The letters come to life when touched, wriggling under your fingers (doubly so when using Force Touch on a modern iPhone), and once the word is complete, you're treated to a little animation that explains what the word means.

 

10.Intro to Colors, by Montessorium

• Price: £3.99
• Made for Ages 5 and under

With Intro to Colors, your child learns the basics of colours through a series of matching games. So it starts out white matching red, blue and yellow before moving on to secondary levels and gradients. Kids learn to mix and match paint to create colours, as well as how to learn to spot and name different colours.
Intro to Colors is a pretty app, which is one reason we like it. But Intro To Colors is designed to appeal to children aged five and under and we think Intro to Colors is a great app that makes use of the iPad to deliver something they would not get from other more traditional means.

 

11.Journeys of Invention

• Price: £7.99
• Age: 4+

One of the most ambitious digital books in existence, Journeys of Invention aims to chart the course of science and technology. It's essentially a series of interwoven chapters, detailing how various inventions have impacted what followed. Many pages enable you to interact with objects, spinning 360-degree 'photographs' with a finger, clambering inside the Apollo 10 Command Module, or sending coded messages using an Enigma machine. Packed with insight and spectacular imagery, it’s the best educational tome on the iPad.

 12.Laugh & Learn Shapes & Colors Music Show for Baby

• Price: Free
• Age: 4+ (made for under 5)

Designed for babies and toddlers, this app offers two simple games. In the first, you tap to hear the name of a shape and tilt the device to make it bounce around. In the second, there's a keyboard to prod, and each shape has its own song to sing along to. This is, in all honesty, not a terribly elegant app, but in our experience it seems captivating to tiny humans grappling with technology for the first time.

 

13.LEGO DUPLO Train

• FREE
• Ages 5 and under

Your toddler will love to drive a colourful LEGO DUPLO Train from station to station. Choosing and loading wagons, building bridges, stopping at crossings, refueling and laying new tracks around pesky rocks. A toddler's dream.

 

14.Little Digits [iPad only]

• Price: £2.99
• Made for 5 and under

Back when the iPad first arrived, people were excited to learn it could in fact recognise all ten fingers touching the screen at once, yet few apps took advantage of this. Little Digits reasons that kids often count by using their fingers, and here they can do so by prodding an iPad. Every additional digit used updates the on-screen number accordingly (numbers here being represented by inventive, colourful beasts); and once everyone's familiar with how the app works, there are basic counting and maths puzzles to try.

 15.Mathletics Student [iPad only]

• Free. Requires annual subscription
• Rating: 4+

Recommended by teachers and parents is Mathletics, a subscription-based online system of maths learning.
For £39/year the child can run through adaptive-learning, level-staged maths tasks and games via computer or iPad app. Students learn at their own pace.
Mathletics is fun and features a great rewards system for kids, who win Bronze, Silver and Gold certificates by scoring points in a wide range of maths questions. These questions are presented in a fun and colourful way with animations to brighten things up but also to show how to reach the correct answers. Parents will learn a thing ot two, too.
Live Mathletics sets the child up against other Mathletics players across the world, and is a great way to learn simple number bonds and increase the kids' recall speed.
Times Tables Toons helps teach children their times table through song and animal animation.
There are weekly progress emails to monitor progress via a Parent Centre.
My daughter has been using Mathletics for over a year now, and it has undoubtedly helped her with her maths, and me understanding/remembering/learning alongside her. We sit down a few times a week for short periods of time, or for one half-hour session that should be long enough for her to score her 1,000 points and earn a new certificate. She loves it, too.