I kind of love that my children love my iPhone, because their love of my iPhone means that I have one more tool for distracting them when we’re traveling, or even just making a run to the grocery store, because, seriously, there are only so many times that one can hear are we there yet before one goes completely insane.
Well here’s an app that won’t have you wringing your hands over the question
of whether you’re exposing your kids to too many video games.
[see our giveaway after the jump]
Tales2Go is basically good old fashioned storytelling, made accessible in a
subscription-based app form by brilliant mom Tracy Weil. Just hand over the phone, and let the kids choose from a huge library
of stories sorted by age, genre, storyteller and more, whether your kids want to hear Aesop’s fables, fairy tales from
around the world, or Encyclopedia Brown.
This vast, multicultural array of some of our country’s greatest storytellers really are impressive, including folks like Bill Harley, Pete Seeger, Baba Jamal Koram, Alton Chung, and Amy Friedman, who we’ve adored since Cool Mom Picks discovered her own series, Tell Me a Story. There are also publishers like Scholastic and August House.
There’s no video or graphics involved, so there’s no need for the kids
to fight over the device to get a better view, and you can indulge in
feeling just a little bit smug that your kids are exercising their
listening skills and their imaginations. –Catherine
You
can find Tales2Go through their website and at iTunes where you can download a free, 30-day trial. Blackberry and Treo versions coming soon!
Congratulation to Kate S, lucky winner of the annual subscription!
Trust me on this–If you distract your kids instead of teaching them to behave and control themselves, you will be supporting them until you die young of moral and economic exhaustion! Not a good plan, I promise you.
Good point Chris! We look at books on tape more as an alternative to videos or games, than an alternative to good parenting.
Chris, sanctimonious much? Kids learn to control themselves OVER TIME in response to frontal lobe development, which doesn’t end until the early 20s. Stop judging the presentation of information.