For moms, entire days can be spent trying to keep kids entertained in order to finish simple tasks like washing the dishes, doing laundry, or cooking meals, in a timely manner. Outside of the home, waiting for a dinner table at a restaurant or trying on clothes can be excruciating with bored and fussy children.
Luckily, Android phones and thousands of apps available in the Android Market can be a great distraction for kids, while helping them learn and keeping them creatively engaged.
Kids Finger Paint
The Kids Finger Paint app unlocks the endless creativity of your child with no mess or wasted paper. Kids can use their finger to draw and paint on colorful, seasonal backgrounds or simply on a plain white screen.
Designed with young children in mind, Kids Finger Paint lets kids choose their own background, brush size, and paint color from a color wheel, and comes with a “back” key to undo mistakes. Shaking the phone clears the screen so kids can start over with a new picture, and when the artwork is finished, it can be saved to the gallery and easily shared with friends and family via email and Facebook.
This is a particularly great app because there’s no limit to the fun. As long as your child has an imagination, Kids Finger Paint is in style.
iStoryBooks
The iStoryBooks Android apps are the next generation of storytelling for children. Integrated with the latest technology, iStoryBooks lets children to enjoy their favorite stories without needing an adult read them aloud.
Each book published by iStoryBooks is a picture book with audio included, so bedtime stories and fairy tales read themselves. With new books downloaded to the app automatically every two weeks, kids won’t run out of new stories to enjoy. In addition to classic tales like Cinderella and Snow White, iStoryBooks includes educational books to help children learn the alphabet, solve riddles, and identify national monuments.
The iStoryBook website also offers games, puzzles, and coloring pages so kids can have fun offline with some of their favorite characters from the stories.
Kids Numbers and Math
When handing off your Android to your kids (I tested all of these on my daughter’s T-Mobile Samsung Galaxy S as an FYI), you want to be confident that the time they’re on your phone isn’t wasted. The Kids Numbers and Math app a fun way to not only keep kids busy, but also help them learn numbers and build basic math skills.
And with fun, engaging games, parents find that their kids actually enjoy learning math skills – from basic counting to addition, subtraction, and advanced exercises.
Kids Numbers and Math doesn’t overload children with too many audio and visual stimuli, making the game a delight for children and a winning choice for parents. The app strives to give children just the right balance between education and fun, so it doesn’t feature fun at the expense of education – or education at the expense of fun.
Kid Mode
The Kid Mode app is packed with hundreds of fun, educational games and videos perfect for kids ages eight and under. Babies can listen to baby songs, lullaby music, and videos about shapes, letters, patterns, numbers, the alphabet, and animals, and older kids can play math, reading, brain, and action games and try their hand at logic puzzles all from the same app.
For parents, the app’s biggest advantage is its Child Lock feature, which keeps the phone inside Kid Mode. Even when kids press the home screen button, the phone will remain in Kid Mode, eliminating the risk of having a child email your boss, call an acquaintance, or get on the Internet.
Parents can also add other favorite apps, such as Angry Birds and Fruit Ninja, to the app, so kids can play without accidentally or intentionally accessing apps intended for adults. Wi-Fi and Flash are required for many of the app’s features, so make sure your phone has these capabilities.
Air Penguin
On the non-educational, non-creative front, Air Penguin is a game that appeals to every kid’s “just one more time” instinct – and parents will love it, too (even CNet loved it)!
The goal of the game is simply to jump, fly, and dodge by tilting your phone to guide Air Penguin through Antarctica to save his family from melting ice caps. With adorable graphics and easy-to-play design, Air Penguin will keep kids hooked and entertained for hours on end.
Rae is a mom of four, a home based business owner and owner of various small niche websites, including ApronAddicts.com which highlights the best in fashionable aprons and gives tons of ideas on simple recipes and other creative kitchen ideas.
