Horton Hatches the Egg – Dr. Seuss

Overview

Another Dr. Seuss treasure, Horton Hatches the Egg is a delightful story of how Horton follows through with his promise to a friend even if he isn’t the most suitable person for the job, would rather go play with friends or the weather turns unpleasant. The app includes many features we have come to expect to be included in ebooks.

Features include:

• Navigation menu
• Options to control sound effects, hot spots and alerts
• Multiple options for enjoying the story
• Record your own voice

Quality

Horton Hatches the Egg contains an almost ideal interface making the app easy to use for all ages, whether enjoying the story, navigating or making and sharing your own recordings. The ability to quickly navigate through the pages and from the end of the story back to the beginning is a must have; this app delivers nicely on that feature. Some buttons for external links are easily accessible to young users so watch for those on the main screen.

High quality design elements are used throughout the app; such as the narration, text highlighting, images and word association.

Education

Most ebooks have an educational value of some sort, this app increases theirs by adding the capability to touch words and hear them spoken aloud and to touch pictures to hear and see the word. Word association has many benefits for beginning readers. Text highlighting during narration is done very nicely and is another important feature for beginning readers.

Three standard options for enjoying the story; read to me, read myself and auto play. Auto play reads the story and turns the pages, the user is not able to touch the objects to hear them spoken and the navigation menu is not available. With the Read to Me option the user turns the pages and they can choose to have the story read to them in the voice of the narrator provided with the app or using your customized recordings. Your recordings can be shared with other devices that also have this app. The navigation menu is available at the bottom of the page. The Read to Myself does not highlight the text, which would be very distracting to any reader, nor does it narrate the text except when a word is touched.

Just as import as the book features is the message the story sends. Horton stays faithful to his promise to friend Mayzie. He promised to care for Mayzie’s egg while she takes a break, never mind that elephants aren’t the most suitable for sitting on eggs and no matter the weather or how badly Horton wanted to join the others in play or how others teased him, Horton sits on the egg until it finally hatches.

The app does not include any formal reading comprehension elements that we are starting to see in other ebooks.

Entertainment

Dr. Seuss ebooks from Oceanhouse media are always enjoyable. I grew up loving Dr. Seuss books and still enjoy sharing them with children. Oceanhouse media has taken these fun-loving books to the next level by adding navigation features that make it easy to move around the app, educational features to extend beginning readers vocabulary and assist them in learning to read, and adding sounds effects and things to make them even more fun to share, all the while staying true to the originals.

Value

At first glance one may think this book is priced on the high end, but when you take into account all of the features included in such a high quality app, the price seems much more reasonable. Plus, it makes it easier to take books along when your family is on the go. This is a universal app that performs the same regardless of the device.

Child Friendliness

There are links to be aware of on the main page which should be moved to the information menu where the other developer information is already located.