Daddy Mojo’s favorite free iPad apps for toddlers

Baby Mojo is just 16 months but he loves to interact with the iPad.  We’ve found a couple great apps that help teach him basic words and phonics.  Verbally, we’ll teach him the sounds of the alphabet, but when he sees the letters we’re teaching him the phonetic pronunciation.  All of these apps are free, but some of them may have additional aspects that you pay money for.

Tiki Bear Phonics

This is our favourite iPad app.  We had to spell ‘favorite’ like that because, like many of the children’s apps, they’re recorded in a British dialect.  This is a great app because it breaks down all of the consonants phonetically and has three examples of simple objects.  When you touch one of the objects it says what it is and there is a very chilled out soundtrack in the background.  The app has two ways to interact with it, a learning side and one for games.

The games are a bit too advanced for a 16 month old, but they’d be perfect for a 2 year old.  Regardless, this is Baby Mojo’s go to app when he’s feeling cranky.

Spongewords

This free app has a couple elements that are paid, but is still worth getting for free.  It features video elements and basic to advanced words, but the videos are great and really hold your attention.

My First Words

The free version of this app starts with a good stable of words and pictures that are controlled by touching the screen.  Baby Mojo loves this and because of that this is another one of his go to apps that can help salvage a tantrum.  The paid features of this app unlock four additional categories of flash cards and it only costs .99.

ABC Phonetics

This is a very good phonics app because it has clear, large animated graphics and they all have an animal that cooresponds to the letter.  Your child will need to have a handle on moving their finger to turn the page, but that’s the only drawback of this free app.

MeeGenius

This free app has 6 children’s books with old school, classic drawings and has the words light up as they’re being read.  That feature is great once your child is able to follow the words and put together the phonetic sounds.  Three Little Pigs and The Boy Who Cried Wolf are just two of the stories that are on this great, free app.

AppShopper

This is not a children’s app, but this is how you can score lots of free apps for your iPad.  Some apps will be free or discounted for a day and you can easily search for them by category using AppShopper.  We used this app to find most of these children’s apps and a couple of them were free for a day, but may still be free if you act quickly.