Jonty The Dinosaur

[appimg 626133655]

App Info

Price: [app 626133655] {price}
AppStore User Rating: {stars}[/app]

Overview

Jonty the Dinosaur is a cute interactive ebook that every child will relate to. The main character, Jonty, has a great day filled with exciting and fun pastimes and then finds he cannot go to sleep that night. Children can try all sorts of tactics to help the poor dinosaur get some shuteye, and finally, Jonty nods off.

Jonty the Dinosaur is included in our round up of At-A-Glance: Dinosaur Apps for Kids post.

Features include:

• Four play modes (read aloud, read to me, autoplay, and add to the story)
• Background music changes appropriately from upbeat to lullaby
• Animations and interactions
• Font designed for young learners
• Highlighting as words are read

Quality

The story of Jonty the Dinosaur will entertain and delight young children. Who hasn’t had the experience of difficulty falling asleep after a full and exciting day?  Young children will discover that they are far from alone in this.  This app is entertaining, with a nice amount of interactivity to keep children’s interest and coax them into exploring each page. The illustrations are very pleasant, and the narration is accurate and clear. The one drawback is that the pages seem to take a long time to load, many times prompting a “loading” screen showing Jonty’s footprints between pages for several seconds. This could cause a bit of impatience for some young users.

Education

Jonty the Dinosaur offers one of the best kinds of educational content: unobtrusive. Young children will enjoy the story over and over, and never even realize they are learning vocabulary and self-help strategies to use on those nights when they have trouble sleeping. For little ones, half the battle is learning to identify and express their emotions and internal states, so walking with Jonty through his attempts to get comfortable by dimming the light, quieting the room, using the fan and pulling up the blanket will come back to mind when the situation hits in the real world.

The developers of Jonty did a good job with the narration, as well. The book will support early literacy development through use of three reading modes: autoplay, read- to-me, and read myself. Let the youngest and least experienced users use the autoplay mode, which is comparable to having the story read aloud by someone else. Children who are beginning to show interest in the relationship between spoken and printed words will benefit from the read-to-me mode, where a narrator shares each page and words are highlighted as they are spoken (the timing is excellent, by the way).  The user is in charge of turning the pages, leaving lots of time to play with the interactive portions of each section. In the read myself mode, young users can get help with the tough words by touching them.

Entertainment

Jonty the Dinosaur offers a host of fun interactions that will tickle most young users. In the three reading modes, each page features some sound effects and animations to discover. Children will also enjoy the “pizza decorating” activity towards the end of Jonty’s busy day.  After Jonty goes to bed, young users can help him solve each of his comfort problems through such activities as turning on the fan, feeding the fish, and covering him with the blanket. They can even play with the toys in his room.

Children will also enjoy the “Add to the Story” mode that the app offers. When this option is selected, there is a ribbon bookmark added to each page. Touching the ribbon activates a set of optional items to add to the page. For example, there is an airplane that can fly across the sky and a hat that does different things on different pages. The options that will work on a given page are highlighted, and children can easily turn them on or off by touching the picture, then touching the X in the top corner of active pictures.

Value

Jonty the Dinosaur is one of those ebooks that makes an outstanding bedtime story or even a ritual. The background music could be invaluable for settling a fussy child or for cuing a preschooler that bedtime is near. Nearly every aspect of the story is designed to help children wind down and go to bed, and harried parents will love that aspect of the app. It also offers some great educational activities as well as addressing a topic that every child deals with from time to time by offering good strategies to internalize.  This one should be read frequently!

Child Friendliness

This app is very child-friendly. There are no outside advertisements, no links to the internet, social media or email, and no in-app purchases. The makers are very aware of possible parental concerns related to these areas, and provide an inactive link to their website, but an adult would need to copy the information and type it into the browser by hand.