MyBackpack - Waterford Learning
By Mieke VanderBorght,
Common Sense Media Reviewer
Common Sense Media Reviewers
Free games, stories, songs vary in quality and target age.
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MyBackpack - Waterford Learning
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What’s It About?
MYBACKPACK - WATERFORD LEARNING has four sections: storybooks, songs, nursery rhymes, and mental math games. Kids can read or follow along with cross-cultural, fully illustrated storybooks. Short songs with accompanying animations address a wide variety of topics from early math and science to grammar and punctuation. Nursery rhymes are presented as digital board books; children can read, be read to, or hear the rhyme as a song. To use the mental math section, kids sign in with a username and progress through various games that require kids to complete quick, simple addition and subtraction equations. Animal characters climb a mountain, fly upward in a hot air balloon, or balance an equation on a scale.
Is It Any Good?
The four components form a bit of a hodgepodge that varies in quality and appropriate target age range. The nursery rhymes are most appealing for the young preschool set, but kids won't be ready for the mental math games until early elementary school. The storybook collection has classics from a variety of cultures and feature print-quality illustrations and multiple read options, but a few books won't open or they freeze. Most appropriate for an early elementary group, the songs are the most disappointing: Lyrics and story lines are not always easy to follow and, without larger context, lose much of their potential to drive home a point. The reading options -- while fairly standard in children's ebooks -- are great to have, and kids can tap on single words for pronunciation if they're reading on their own and get stuck. Also, having the content available in Spanish is a big plus. Though there aren't many of the interactive features kids have come to expect, and there are occasional glitches and delays, there's a lot of content, and all for free, so parents can pick and choose the parts that work best for their kids.
Talk to Your Kids About ...
Families can talk about the stories: Read them together and use them as conversation starters. Help beginning readers read the stories aloud.
Use the songs as launchpads for exploring lots of early learning topics. Help kids hear and understand the lyrics and then expand on the themes with research and activities.
App Details
- Device: iPad
- Subjects: Language & Reading : reading, Math : addition, subtraction
- Pricing structure: Free
- Release date: September 11, 2015
- Category: Education
- Topics: Music and Sing-Along , Numbers and Letters
- Publisher: Waterford Institute
- Version: 12.0.0
- Minimum software requirements: iOS 6.0 or later
- Last updated: July 27, 2016
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