It’s mid-December, so it’s probably time for you to get on a plane with the kids. You would rather wait in line at the DMV for six hours with no coffee.
Thank goodness for modern technology!
Here are the apps that saved us on a 4-flight journey (round trip) to see our family in Florida. The Momsicle Facebook community helped me improve my selection of iPhone apps for the kids (ages 3 and 1). Please leave a comment to let us know what your own favorites are!
Momsicle’s Favorite Preschool iPhone Apps
Trucks by Duck Duck Moose
K-Pants–the three year old–could choose to drag a car through the mud and then wash it; collect trash and recycling; load and move dirt with construction equipment; direct traffic with a traffic light; or fix flat tires at the mechanic.
Finger tapping is incredibly simple in all options except the trash and recycling game (but still not too hard there). Since we couldn’t pack our Tonka trucks in our carry-on luggage, Trucks by Duck Duck Moose was the next best thing.
Toca Train by Toca Boca
This game feels like being on the Island of Sodor. If your child is a Thomas fan, we highly recommend it.
Kids can drive the train around, blow the whistle, pick up passengers, and carry and drop-off freight. It helps to have an adult practice with the preschooler for at least the first time or two, because they might miss stations or have trouble with the speed lever. But once or twice was all it took for K-Pants to be independent.
Monster at the End of This Book by Sesame Street
It’s a classic and Sesame did a great job bringing the book to life in this app. K-Pants thought Grover was so funny.
K-Pants’s favorite parts were the interactive pages: snapping the ropes and breaking down the brick wall (above). It helps to show your preschooler how to switch to a favorite page. The down side to this app is that it can take a while to load from page to page, and preschoolers don’t have much patience.
Toca Kitchen Monsters by Toca Boca
Kids choose a monster and then decide what to feed it from the fridge. They can choose how to cook the food (chop, steam, sauté, blend).
K-Pants really loves to blend things because the blender makes the phone vibrate. He ground up a lot of sausage and raw meat. Luckily his monster preferred them that way…
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A HUGE thank you to the Momsicle Facebook community for suggesting so many apps. We were saved because of it! We downloaded lots more that we really liked. These were the standouts.
Note: All of these games are more like toys: you can play with them in various ways. Which is great for preschoolers (it can be stressful to try to “win” a game, especially when it’s hard enough to master the controls of each game). Also, I was not in any way sponsored by any of the developers of these games.
momsicle 
That last one (Kitchen Monster) sounds I would want to play it all by myself. Makes me wish I had an iPhone.
“sounds like” 🙂
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