Our guest post this week is from Lynette Mattke, CEO of PicPocket Books, who is also a co-founder of the Moms With Apps network. Her recent work with The Mother Company shows how apps can have feelings too…
PicPocket Books works with a number of different companies, publishers and independent authors and illustrators, to produce and publish children’s picture book content as mobile apps. We currently have over 130 titles on iTunes. Our most recent app, A Little Book About Feelings, comes from a partnership with the Mother Company, a Los Angeles-based company run by two moms whose goals for exploring and creating options for a healthy intersection of kids and technology fit right in with MomsWithApps.
We all know that come preschool/kindergarten age, a lot of parental and school focus goes toward literacy: ABC’s, 123’s, reading, writing… There are many apps focused on these traditional pathways of early learning, but recent studies show that social and emotional literacy can set young kids off on the best path early in life: if children learn by age 6 learn how to identify and appropriately express feelings, delay gratification, regulate their impulses and develop empathy, they are given a valuable leg up in both school and in life.
Enter The Mother Company, founded and run by two mamas, Abbie Schiller and Samantha Kurtzman-Counter, who recognized a great need in the parenting community for gentle, beautiful, helpful (and fun!) products that teach young children those essential social and emotional skills we all try to teach at home (but could use a little back up!) Things like how to get along with your siblings, be a good friend, use your words, show compassion, and become a good person. Through their “Ruby’s Studio” line of DVDs, downloads, books, music, dolls and related products, they incorporate a gentle, stylish, kind of old-school aesthetic to engage kids as they absorb these important life lessons.
The Mother Company’s latest venture, in partnership with PicPocket Books, is an adorable, lightly animated storybook app called “A Little Book About Feelings,” based on their children’s picture book of the same name. The app takes kids through the origins, variety and universality of feelings – helping kids find words to express them and letting kids know they are not alone in their big feelings. The app is narrated by Ruby, the Mary-Poppins-meets-Mr-Rogers-
As mamas of young kids themselves, Abbie and Sam were super eager to partner with PicPocket Books and enter the world of apps, where they’ve witnessed such a revolutionary new avenue for learning. “A Little Book About Feelings” is just the beginning, with many uniquely helpful and beautiful apps in the pipeline designed to help parents raise kids who are more cooperative, communicative and self-aware. What parent doesn’t get the need for that?
