Alphabet Animals: A Slide-and-Peek Adventure Review

Alphabet Animals: A Slide-and-Peek Adventure is a very nice adaptation of the title by the same name, now developed for iPad by Auryn Apps.

Alphabet Animals: A Slide-and-Peek Adventure is a book we are familiar with from our local library, as each letter of the alphabet is represented by an animal posed to represent each letter corresponding to the first letter of its name.

In the book, a page can be slid out that labels the animal and the letter it is emulating - such as “A” for alligator or “B” for bird.

Such is the same here, yet in this app, a drag of a finger will pull out the tab, and with a tap clear, well-spoken children’s narration speaks the animal and letter names as well.

Interesting fantasy animals are included such as “Dragon” and “Unicorn” as well as Newt for “N” or Xenops, a small bird for letter X. They are interesting choices, yet I do wonder if babies completely green to the alphabet will mistake “X” for letter “B” for bird. Likewise, I was hard-pressed to see the “T” in the tiger illustration.

Also new to this title is how each animal includes minor animated elements, subtle but effective, as each “tab” is pulled - details not possible in the published book and which add extra richness to this experience.

I do think it would be a nice touch to have the names of these animals labeled with words as shown in the published book to allow parents to point to the word as the narration is heard, but this is a minor note in a bright and colorful children’s app.

Although I do not expect this app to take the place of children exploring unique flap books such as this, I do appreciate that these tabs can’t be torn when reading this book in digital form, as my son was really hard on books such as this as a toddler, making this a nice choice for other young children who may have difficulty with these slider pages.

I would also like to point out to readers that to celebrate National Reading Month, Auryn's National Reading Month Giveaway will be making an app for each day in March free to download.

This is a huge boon to families, schools and other practitioners who will benefit from adding to their digital library.

From what I have seen, Auryn’s apps, although varied in terms of style, are uniformly high in terms of quality and are each quite desirable to share with children. Please checkout their library of apps in iTunes.