ipad favorites

I would be remiss if I said that the only thing we do with our ipad is let our daughter play educational games. Um, no. We let her watch her fair share of Netflix while she colors and plays play dough. And rides in the car. And at bedtime. We have favorite shows, like Barney, Sesame Street, Super Why, and the Wonder Pests Pets. 

She wants to play with the toy, too, though, not just stare mindlessly at it. We usually spend about an hour a day playing apps. One app itself does not usually last very long; she likes to bounce back and forth between several. I'm going to do a quickie review on my favorite three today. &also note that they wouldn't be my favorites if the littles didn't agree.  

My personal favorite is the Itsy Bitsy Spider app by Duck Duck Moose. Um, how could you NOT love an app that is made by such a fun named company?? It is super interactive. Anything you touch reacts. There are different animals jumping through windows, a flower pot that grows a crab, little monsters that slide down a rainbow, a little fly that tells a story and gives factoids. There is a little squirrel on the roof that gathers nuts and counts them. You can make it rain. The graphics are very clear and it entertains the tiny human. &plusalso you can record yourself singing the song and let it be the background music. My husband did the recording on ours and I can only tolerate it a few rounds, but it is still super cute! 

Another favorite is Fish School , also by Duck Duck Moose. Are you seeing a trend here?? This app does letters, numbers, colors, shapes, the alphabet song and a little play session. We have a lot of fun with this. It is easy for her to touch the bubble to switch from one lesson to the next. The fish make the letters, numbers and shapes. When you're doing colors, a school of different shades of fish comes out, then when you select a color fish, a school of that color fish comes out. There's not a whole lot to do and once you go through all the letters, shapes, numbers, etc. you're basically through. You know, you can only do the ABCs so many times. We typically get about ten minutes out of this one. 

Then you have Bugs and Buttons . This app is so much more than just bugs. It has the most educational potential of any of our apps thus far. There is a letter train where you have to pick out the missing letter from several choices at the bottom. There are games, too, where you can sling bees at a target or "pop" ants, roaches, and bees as they scurry across the screen. Those roaches kill me every time. Haha. Honestly, this app has so many different games to play we haven't touched on half of them. I was sold when I read a review saying that it had taught the reviewer's daughter her letters and numbers by the time she was 24 months old or something like that. It's on the app store review if you want the specifics. Anyways, we have sat and played this app for 20+ minutes so it was well worth the money spent. I am hoping the bee flinging game will help prepare her for Angry Birds. She is obsessed with Angry Birds but honestly cannot figure out how to fling them properly. Not that I expect her to at 18 months...it's just, if she wants to play it, can we please learn to play it right?

So, those are our favorite apps of the week this week. And just a quick disclaimer: this post is not sponsored. These are our honest opinions of these apps, and our goal in doing this is simply to help other moms and babies out there find apps they'll love before putting money into them.  

Written by Heather Sullivan. All images and writings copy right 2012.