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The Best iPhone Apps for Kids

Say you were faced with a three-year-old child on the verge of full meltdown–which iPhone apps would distract and delight them enough to avoid mayhem?

One of the added benefits of the iPhone is that kids find it absolutely mesmerizing. And when equipped with apps that children like, it can often be the perfect non-chemical tranquilizer.

There are 1360 apps tagged for kids in the iTunes app store, with thousands of ratings and user comments. To sort through the maze of offerings, here are here are some of the most mentioned in response to an earlier tweet I made (thanks to the hundreds who responded), arranged by age, from young to old. Please add your suggestions, criticisms; and make the list longer.

• Wheels on the Bus ($.99) is an electronic popup book, where you drive the action by touching, swipe and tapping their way through the familiar preschool song. Ages 2-5.

• Scoops ($.99) lets you tilt your screen left or right to sort falling scoops of ice cream. You can make patterns with same-colored scoops, while dodging the veggies. Ages 3-up.

• iWriteWords ($.99) turns the letters of the alphabet into dot-to-dot puzzles. Ages 4-5. A more limited lite version is free.

• Scribble ($.99), is one of many drawing apps that turn the screen into a tiny easel. You can also import pictures from your photo library to put a mustache on Grandma. A quick shake erases the photos. Ages 3-up. Older kids love Crayon Physics Deluxe ($4.99 from Hudson, for 9-up) which turns scribbles into moving puzzles.

• Tappy Tunes ($1.99) plays back familiar songs to a beat determined by your child’s finger taps. The free lite version contains a limited selection of songs.

• Oregon Trail ($4.99) is a cartoonish but effective small screen re-make of the 1980’s classic educational simulation. The funny thing is that it was created in France. Ages 10-up.

• Bookworm ($4.99) is a well designed, ad-free word game that can make spelling fun. There’s also Hasbro’s Scrabble, also $4.99.

Aside from actual games, no-fail timekillers abound in the app store abound. iSteam ($.99) lets children uncover hidden photos, by rubbing their finger on a steamy mirror. Koi Pond ($.99) turns your screen into a beautiful fish pond, where each touch creates ripples and scares away fish (shaking your iPhone adds fish food to the water). Fluid, a free app, is similar, with the added ability of importing your photos as the water’s surface. Bubblesnap (also free) is one of many shrink-wrap popping apps that, for some reason, are equally as addicting as the real thing. For the musically inclined, MiniPiano (free) is a 14-key keyboard; TonePad (free) lets children program song patterns with dots.

No matter what app you are using, here are some additional parental survival tips: Re-arrange your icons so that your children’s apps end up on the same page, making them easy to find.

Also, be sure to stock some family photos and movies in your iPod’s library. You can find some excellent podcasts, for example, including the Sesame Street or PBS Kids’ Sprout Player. Also don’t forget to put your iPhone on airplane mode before you pass it to your toddler. You never know who they’ll call.

[Thanks: http://gadgetwise.blogs.nytimes.com]

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