Animal SnAPP: Farm Review

Animal SnAPP: Farm is a series of six delightful tales about animals on a farm, also including a wonderful way of story selection, as children complete a slider puzzle of each animal they would like to choose.

Starring animals such as a lamb, goat, pig or dog, these stories are as bright and colorful as can be. Each of these stories are charming to read and often including the foibles of children seen within these anthropomorphic animals such as a sheep missing his mom after getting lost, a cow in need of sleep, or a moody pig, making these tales relatable to children and their parents can relate to.

As with other apps by Nosy Crow, children have a choice to Read and Play which allows children to read along with highlighted, charming narration by children and allowing them to tap animals in this book to hear them talk additional lines of text as long as they wish.

Read by Myself allows children to thoughtfully choose the length of time that text on the page will be available before moving on, adapting the flow to text to be read by children on their own, set to their own reading abilities.

Although I often find stories written in rhyme forced and awkward to read, I do not find this to be the case with the tales from Animal SnAPP: Farm, well-written by first-time storybook writer Axel Scheffer, celebrated illustrator for children’s books such as The Gruffalo.

The girl or boy who narrates these stories does a very good job as well, with inflections nicely helping these tales along - always important, especially within a rhyming story.

The only note I do have is that I would love to see a choice to add the highlighting on the background animals who have something to say with a tap, helping young children fully explore this app.

Although I appreciate the need to double tap the page turning arrows, reducing the accidental page turning, I would also love to see a highlight of sorts letting children know when all the action of these stories has played out, and it is safe to turn the page.

These are minor notes in a universal application that will be enjoyed by a wide range of children as well as their adults, but I would love to see users of devices before IPhone 4 and iPad 2 have a chance to enjoy this application.

Before knowing this limitation, I did try to install Animal SnAPP: Farm on my iPad 1 as this is the iPad we feel comfortable leaving alone with out 4.5 year old son. Unable to install this app, it was stated that Animal SnAPP: Farm only worked on devices with a forward-facing camera, yet I have not been able to find any extras that include the camera technology.

I do hope an update could include older models of iPhone and iPad apps, as from what I can tell, what this app has to offer would translate well onto other devices as well.