4
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Early Language Development with Sleepy Fred App Review

App Info

Price: $1.49

Overview

Sleepy Fred wants to go to bed, but before he does, he has a lot of tasks to complete. With a “scurry-hurry, scurry-hurry, quack quack quack,” will he get them all done before he falls asleep? This rhyming book takes kids through Sleepy Fred’s traditional bedtime routine and helps build their early reading skills at the same time. The cute story line and colorful illustrations along with the vocabulary and comprehension activities will help engage kids and make building their reading skills fun.

Features include:

  • Read with Text
  • Read with Audio
  • Animated illustrations
  • Vocabulary and comprehension activities

Quality

The story of Sleepy Fred is a cute one with well-placed rhymes to get kids’ attention and help them read along. The story itself does contain a few errors in capitalization and punctuation. While these will largely go unnoticed by the book’s young audience, developers still should’ve taken the time to get it right. The story also lacks voice audio prompts on the main screen which may make it difficult for kids to get to the audio version of the text or a particular comprehension activity. Within the text itself, kids will find cute pictures of Sleepy Fred and his mom. These pictures contain a small amount of animation, such as a clock ticking and a bee flying, but the level of animation could be increased or made interactive for a more engaging experience.

Education

The app bills itself as an app for early language development, however it lacks many features that support language development. For example, there is no text highlighting in the audio version of the story and the comprehension activities lack text to help kids truly build their beginning vocabulary skills. For example, the first activity, labeled “Matching Nouns,” shows kids a picture and instructs them to “Find one like this” in the picture from the story. While all of the items in the pictures are recognizable (plants, cups, bananas, etc.), it would vastly improve the app to say the name of the object at some point during the activity. This isn’t to say that the activities are bad, just that they could be improved. Some of them, such as identifying functions, identifying categories, and identifying parts of an object or animal are good activities to help kids learn to look at objects in new ways.

Entertainment

The story itself is what will engage the kids the most. It is a cute story with a fun repeating rhyme on every other page that will hook kids’ attention. The activities, while simple, are also the type of activities that beginning learners seem to enjoy.

Value

This app is priced slightly higher than other ebooks, many of which are more interactive and of a higher quality than this one. While the story is engaging and kids will like the vocabulary activities, the app doesn’t have an extended value. Once kids have read through it all, they’re not very likely to pick it up again.

Child Friendliness

Aside from the lack of audio narration on the main screen, the app earns points for child friendliness. It does not contain any ads, social media, or even a settings screen that will pull kids’ attention away from the story and activities.

  • NO external links
  • NO social media
  • NO 3rd party ads
  • NO in-app purchase
Early Language Development with Sleepy Fred
Early Language Development with Sleepy Fred
Follow Sleepy Fred as he gets ready for bed in this cute rhyming story for kids.
Quality
Education
Entertainment
Value
Child Friendly
4
Where to Buy