Preschoolers ABC Playground App Review
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App Overview
The Preschoolers ABC Playground app teaches reading and writing skills. Parents and teachers will love this app because it grows with your child. Kids will love this app because it’s fun. The app teaches letter-sound recognition, writing skills, beginning reading skills, and upper and lower case letter discernment. The activities are simple, easy to navigate, and they make learning fun. The music is exciting and the colors are bright and engaging. Included in the app is an incentive game called the Yeti and his Flying Apple Core. Kids can earn apples while playing the activities and then, they will use those apples to play the yeti game. My son thought this was the coolest game ever and it was a huge incentive to do the activities. The developer of this app is Jan Essig. He has a collection of other playground learning apps for kids. He studied communication design studies with an emphasis on illustration at Mannheim University before deciding to build, create, illustrate, and design apps for kids.
App Features
When you enter the app, you will notice that are many learning activities available. Some are more difficult than others but they are all very well designed. Most of the activities have beginner, intermediate, and advanced levels to choose from. The various activities work on writing letters, writing words, matching letters, matching words with pictures, and matching lower case and uppercase letters. There are also multiple fonts available which helps the child universally understand the letters and words. By trying out both cursive, italic, and other difficult fonts, the child will begin to understand the key characteristics for each letter regardless of the format. The app is available in 6 different languages which makes it perfect for the bilingual child. This app is used in many different schools across the world. The settings are simple and the navigation is easy to understand.
Parental Controls
Parents will love this app because of a few great features. First, there are no in-app advertisements or purchases in the children’s games or activities whatsoever. The only in-app advertisement I found was in the parents’ settings menu and it is just a link to their other apps available for purchase. Kids cannot access the main menu without holding down a button for 3 seconds. The second reason parents will love this app is because they are able to put a limit on the amount of time the child can play the app. The parent chooses the amount of time in the settings menu and then it will count down on the bottom right corner of the screen. Once the timer is out, the child will no longer be able to play the app unless a parent unlocks it. Last, parents can hide the yeti game from the app all together or they can allow it to be an incentive game for practicing their reading and writing skills.The parent has a lot of control with this app to help children stay focused, and not get distracted.
The Yeti and his Flying Apple Core Game
There aren’t a lot of apps that have built-in incentive games for the child. The ones that I have seen were not very effective. Surprisingly, this game was a very effective incentive for my son. The learning activities are fun but having this extra yeti game was the difference between my son playing the activities for 10 minutes and playing the activities for a hour if I would let him. He loved playing the yeti game and earning apples. The yeti character is the most animated in the app by far. Kids earn apples by playing the activities and then they can use those apples to play the yeti game. It is a very short game so they will constantly be needing to work on more activities in order to play the game. How the game works is simple that the child throws an apple core as far as they can on the screen and tries to get it as far as possible to break their high score. My 5 and 3 year old did struggle a little bit with hitting the screen fast enough to throw the apple. It takes a little bit of coordination but they did get the hang of it over time.
What’s Great About This App
Preschoolers ABC Playground app is a great app for teaching reading and writing skills. I do believe this app grows with your child and will help them for a long period of time. I would recommend this app to children between the ages of 3 and 6 years of age. I love the bright colors and easy navigation. I would like to see the characters within the learning activities a little more animated. They are a bit one dimensional and not as exciting as other characters I have seen in reading apps. The yeti is the exception to that. He is really cool, unique, and funny looking. Kids will love him and they will love the Yeti and his flying apple core game. My favorite learning activity was the matching pairs game. The child has to sound out letters to match pictures or they can also match the upper case letters with the lower case letters. Overall, I definitely was impressed by this reading and writing app. Thank you for reading the Preschoolers ABC Playground App Review. Be sure to check out our other app reviews on the Touch Autism blog.
Spielzeng by Jan Essig contains other playground apps that help encourage learning for kids. At the time of writing this review Preschoolers ABC Playground PRO retailed for $4.99. There is a free trial version available as well.
Buy Preschoolers ABC Playground in the App Store
A fun app for teaching reading and writing skills to kids
