This month, kids can color, play with pets, learn shapes and letters, and express their creativity with Crayola Create and Play. Young kids can practice their addition and multiplication, or play a memory game with Baby Panda Math Games. Older kids can choose their path through a gripping tale of adventure with 57º North. Finally, anyone who has mastered Wordle can try out a brand new and unique take on word puzzles with Knotwords.
Garry Froehlich
Jellybean Tunes
Crayola Create and Play
Crayola Create and Play is an extensive activity app for young kids. As you might expect, Crayola Create and Play includes pages to colour along with dozens of shades of crayons, stamps, and paint rollers with all sorts of patterns. Kids can also choose to create glowing art, and each picture they create goes into their gallery, along with the date they created it. The app also comes with educational activities including spelling words, matching shapes and colours, and pre-coding games. Simple arcade games, colour mixing, and pets to collect and play with round out the activities. Pets are placed in snow, jungle or ship areas and kids interact with them much like using a dollhouse app. As you can tell, there is a lot to do in Crayola Create and Play, and the production values are excellent. The app comes with a 7 day free trial, with a subscription afterwards. Crayola Create and Play is also included as a part of Apple Arcade (which you may already have if you have an Apple One subscription).
Crayola Create and Play+ (requires an Apple Arcade subscription)
57° North
By Mighty Coconut
57° North is a story of adventure and danger where you make decisions that affect the outcome of the story. Two cousins take their boat out in the chilly waters off Alaska, but are soon caught up in a storm and shipwrecked on an island where not everything is as it seems. Each page of the story has a decision to make, such as building a fire or exploring inland, that moves you to a new page and may have consequences regarding how the story ends. The narration is good and the story pages are beautiful and evocative. 57° North contains a gripping tale with twists and turns for middle school kids (it may not be appropriate for younger kids), and they’ll likely want to play it multiple times to see the different endings.
Knotwords
By Zach Gage
If your older kids have mastered Wordle, Knotwords is a challenging, but fun, word game. Knotwords is presented like a crossword puzzle, but instead of clues, the board is divided up into puzzle shaped sections containing letters that you must unscramble into words. In essence, you are fitting pieces of a puzzle together to form a finished crossword while also unscrambling the letters in each piece. It’s a unique and highly polished take on word puzzles and recommended for puzzle lovers. There are daily puzzles to play for free, and a subscription or lifetime in-app purchase to access many more puzzles.
Baby Panda Math Games
By Robert Heck
Baby Panda Math Games contains a collection of quiz-like activities for practicing math concepts. The app comes with a memory game, addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. The games challenge you to answer as many math questions as you can in 30 seconds, or to solve the memory game as quickly as possible. A difficulty slider lets you customize the size of the numbers involved. The game tracks your high scores for each difficulty level. Baby Panda Math Games is a simple, but fun, math quiz game available for iPhones (and plays like an iPhone-sized game on iPads).
