Five star apps
Peekaboo/Baby Touch (Ladybird) - 5/5 - really a gem. Basically, it’s a series of four baby board books. Baby must tap the screen, anywhere (?), and the app shows the next slide. The appeal is the story. The illustrations are very abstract, as you might have seen in some baby books, but still very attractive to baby E. (and H. too). Shows what can be done when you call some true design professionals in.
Tap Tap Baby - 5/5 - another gem. It’s like a bunch of baby toys. It’s unique–I’ve looked for others like it and couldn’t find any. We use this one with E. almost as much as the Counting app.
Counting (has a 1 2 3 logo) - 5/5 - this is what I do with E. when we turn on the machine to play. Fantastic, simple way to teach about numbers. Now, when I go down stairs counting, or hop around counting, E. starts giggling. E. tries to touch the objects himself.
Four star apps
Various Smart Baby Apps - 4.5/5 - we use these all the time. They’re excellently customizable–the programmers/designers really put a lot of thought and work into putting in lots of options that make them maximally usable by people. The other great thing is that there are a lot of words for a very little money. One thing that’s missing is some sort of management system features for Doman users… I’d like to make a special mention & praise of My First 1,000 Words–excellent value. If there is a problem with this, that would prevent me from giving them five stars, it’s that–well, they’re just flashcards, and even with all the features, there isn’t anything extra that puts them over the top. If they had videos, or extra sounds, or something…
Spongewords - 4/5 - I really like this app. It combines some great features that nobody else uses: showing/reading the word, letting the word recede into the background (but still visible), then showing a video (only videos), then bringing the word forward again and showing and reading it again. As it turns out, this is very effective. As to the voiceover–where is that accent from? (Just curious.) And where were the videos made? (They are all, it appears, home-made, but pretty well made.) Also, you get eight different presentations–and some, like the animals one, are very long. Each presentation is a video (you can’t do anything but play or exit the videos), and so not customizable, but the videos are so well-designed that I don’t care.
Animals HD (Let’s Hear the Animals HD) - 4/5 - really like this app. Flashcards combining good pix of animals with animal sounds–for lots of animals. Would make it even better to let us see the words separate from the pix, but it’s still a great app. Excellent feature includes all animals on one slide, or four at a time on one slide; the latter allows one to ask baby, “Which one is the tiger?” E. was getting the answers to those questions right much better than chance! Includes Spanish version.