My Review:For the first five years of their life, your child’s brain is plastic, or malleable, meaning this early learning stage is where creative, thinking and social-emotional skills should take root so that these learning outcomes will last a lifetime.Leo’s Pad Enrichment Program is an award winning learning series for preschoolers designed by Stanford early learning scientists and an Emmy Award-winning creative director. The games in Leo’s Pad address over 25 skills essential to early learning and adjust to each child’s skill level as they play, so content is always highly relevant and engaging.Parents can download the free Learner Mosaic iPhone app to use with Leo’s Pad Enrichment Program. It provides you with insights about your child’s learning strengths and struggles and then offers personalized research-based tips and activity suggestions you can do together to help your learner thrive.
Leo's Pad, created by Kidaptive, is an iPad app that has 6 chapters and a finale which introduce preschoolers to creative learning and fun as they follow Leo (young Leondardo DaVinci) through adventures with his friends (young Galileo Galilei, Marie Curie and more). Children paint, help build items in a puzzle format, trace and work on hand/eye coordination as well as direction following.
An accompany app, Learner Mosaic, is downloadable for the iPhone and gives parents additional insights on their child's progress and learning stages. After a short survey of the child's current skills, it suggests activities and other ways to enhance and grow skills for the individual child.
The app plays out much like a movie, with breaks in the story for children to participate and help Leo and his friends accomplish tasks and reach goals. My children were absorbed in the first couple of chapters for some time, and before I was aware almost 45 minutes had gone by.
I really wanted to like this app, especially since it has a price tag I would never pay for any app. While I see value in the child participation games, they are not anything my kids cannot get from other apps I have. The stories are engaging and the "movie" is well played out, with encouraging life lessons and moral messages.
I was unhappy to see how much time had passed. There is a lot of screen time needed to get through each chapter, and a lot more waiting to finish the entire story. I cut my kids off after a while and have not allowed them to finish the story yet as I dislike how easily they are sucked in and become oblivious to life going on around them. This will be a sick-day or long trip kind of app for my kids, definitely not a daily or even weekly thing.
That said, you can check out the first chapter for free and get 20% off the program if you would like to check it out and form your own opinions, which I strongly encourage everyone to do. My preferences are not by any means the end all of parenting or learning.
To check it out for yourself, go here.
and enter the code TRYLEO at checkout to get a 20% discount on your purchase, if you choose to do so. This discount code is only valid through the link above (Kidaptive) and will not work in the App Store or anywhere else.
This is an app ONLY for iPads and iPhones - it is not available for other platforms at this time.
Through the BzzAgent program, I was been given the opportunity to try a new app for my kids. The Leo's Pad Enrichment Program, normally $25 to purchase, was provided to me for free in exchange for my honest and un-biased review.
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