SpinArt

A fun and creative painting app for the iPhone and iPod touch

Grade: A- | Age rating: 4+ | Price: $0.99

If your kids love the Spin Art game on NickJr.com they’ll love SpinArt, an app that can travel with them anywhere. Make tie-dye like pictures that you can save to your photo gallery again and again. Or, upload pics from your camera and splatter them with paint.

What’s Hot: There are lots of different colors (and glitter!) to choose from. Pick your color, splotch size, and then  tap the white button and double click on the canvas to start the spinning. Click again to make it spin faster. If you’ve always thought of yourself more of a Jackson Pollock—don’t spin the canvas. Feeling artistically stuck? No worries. Just click on the Star button to access their Flickr Group to see what others have made from their SpinArt app.

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Glow Doodle

A fun drawing app for the iPhone and iPod touch

Grade: B+ | Age rating: 2+ | Price: $0.99

Glow Doodle currently appears in the App Store under “Most Grossing” apps—and it has a ton of reviews to go with it.

It’s a very simple yet fun app where you can draw a picture with your fingers on the touch screen of either an iPhone or iPod touch and your drawing will appear (and light up!)  on the screen.

Use colors red, yellow, green or blue and then click “Glow” and watch your drawing light up.

What’s Hot:
I especially liked the “undo” option. If your kid accidentally makes a mark on their beautiful Picasso-in-progress, avoid a meltdown by clicking the undo (the button to the right of “glow”). It can go back quite a few steps. You can also save your drawings to your Photos Album. One trick to Glow Doodle is that you can make one specific part of your drawing glow while the rest of the page is left in the normal view — just draw and then click the glow item first, then click glow again to “un-glow” the drawing board and continue with the rest of the picture with normal lighting. Great for birthday cakes or rocket ships.

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Build a Robot

A fun educational app that turns your child’s creativity into something to color.

Grade: A- | Age rating: 4+ | Price: $1.99

Build a Robot is the first CREATE + PRINT + COLOR app I ever bought. It opened my eyes to a fun and highly useful type of educational app.

What’s Hot: I like that there are so many different options for the robot to change into – and that you can even change the background too. But the ability to download and print your robots so that you can color them later is the best part of this app. Ignore the negative reviews about this app that complain the robot doesn’t move and think of this as a way for your child to create their own coloring book. I can’t wait to buy more CREATE + PRINT + COLOR apps.

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Farm Sounds

A cute animal app for the iPhone and iPod touch your toddler won’t want to put down

Grade: A- | Age rating: 1+ | Price: $0.99

Farm Sounds is a simple app with photos of farm animals that quack, moo, nay or cocka-doodle-do when you touch them. This is a great first app for toddlers learning how to use the touch screen from activating the animal sounds to turning the page.

What’s Hot:
I love that this app has photos of real animals, not cartoon drawings or animations. The sounds the duck, cow, goat, horse and rabbit make are equally true to form. Younger children can have one animal per frame while more experienced app-savvy kids can split the screen into four animals with their noises overlapping—sure to get some giggles from your little one. There are 12 different animals in the paid version and only four animals in the free Farm Sounds Lite app. Read more…

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10 Kids’ iPhone Apps Worth $5 or More

The iTunes store is bursting with free games, many of them well worth playing.  There are thousands more for only $0.99.  It’s easy to discount the expensive apps, but don’t forget:  sometimes you get what you pay for.

If you’re looking for some polished iPhone games with staying power, consider these.  As apps go they’re not cheap, but they offer good value for your money.  Most of these are for older kids, and adults will like them too.

(If you like our reviews, please support us! Clicking our links takes you straight to the iTunes App Store and doesn’t cost you more.)

1.  Tetris, $4.99, ages 7 and up

For those of you (and your kids) who can stand the endless, relentless, inexorable pressure of this iconic puzzle game, be our guest.  If you’ve never had the pleasure of being addicted to a game, now’s your chance.

I had a friend in college who once played so much Tetris that she literally couldn’t stop.  She even mentally played it on the inside of her eyelids when she was trying to fall asleep at night.

If that doesn’t scare you away, I don’t know what will.  It’s fun though.  Really fun.  Too much fun maybe.

2.  Labyrinth 2, $4.99, ages 5 and up

The classic marble maze game of your youth has come to the iPhone with a few deluxe features.  Along with the usual walls and holes, kids now have to navigate magnets, cannons, bumpers, fans, and re-sizers too!  Perfect sound effects and graphics add to what is already a great gaming experience.  Tilt your phone to navigate more levels than you will ever have time to play.

3.   Squiggles, $4.99, ages 5 and up

Squiggles lets kids take iPhone photos and doodle, write, and paint on them with a wide selection of colors, stamps, and funny overlays.

Younger kids will enjoy stamping hearts, flowers, and bubbles on photos.

Older kids will find more sophisticated ways to use this potentially hilarious app, such as adding animal ears and noses, mariachi hats, and mustaches to their friends’ faces.

They can also resize them and move them on the photo for maximum humor. Or distort the photos by selecting tunnel, fisheye, bulge and squeeze (among many other effects).

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