My daughter ‘s home from school today, so it ‘s time for another joint review effort. Today we ‘re taking a quick look at two of the titles in the MPB series from Moving Picture Books “ MPB: Monkeys and MPB: Spaghetti.
MPB Monkeys is a version of ‘Eight Silly Monkeys ‘, and MPB: Spaghetti is a version of ‘On Top of Spaghetti ‘.
What Do They Do?
The MPB series presents ‘classic tales and new favorites ‘ “ aimed at kids aged 3months to 7 years old. My daughter is 6, so she fits in the target group. There are currently around 30 titles from the MPB series in the App Store, priced at $0.99 each “ except for MPB: Spaghetti, which is free.
Each of these is not presented in a typical ebook or even audio book format. Instead as soon as you open the app and choose your language and whether or not you want to see the read-along text on the screen, you then launch straight into the YouTube player and the stories are presented as animated videos.
We chose MPB Spaghetti as our sort of trial run with the series, and added MPB: Monkeys shortly afterwards. Here are some of the other features of these apps:
- 3 to 5 minutes in length
- In English and Spanish (narration)
- English read-along text
- Sing-along songs
- Children and adult storytellers
- Full color 2D and 3D animation
- Lots and lots of sound effects
What Do They Do Well?
The stories are very nicely presented. We both like the videos a lot. The length of them seems spot-on, not too short and not overly long.
The animation is great and fun to watch, and there are lots of fun sound effects as well. My daughter especially likes when there are songs included as well.
The content “ at least in the two we have tried “ is nice and lighthearted, and there are several others in the series that look interesting to both of us.
We also enjoyed the narration in both stories “ it was clear, easy to hear, and funny in places.
The read-along text is presented well also, with words highlighted one at a time as they ‘re spoken.
What ‘s Not So Good?
My daughter only had one complaint – ‘they ‘re big ‘ “ as in, the apps take a long time to sync to ‘her ‘ iPhone and she has to ask several times ‘is it done yet? ‘ while waiting on the sync. The file sizes are too big for WiFi downloads to be much fun “ I haven ‘t looked at all 30 in the series, but most seem to range between 100-190mb.
Overall
Both of us are very fond of these two stories, and we ‘ve played them many times over since getting them.
They seem very well pitched for their target age group, and the video presentations seem very high quality “ from illustration to sound effects and narration. They ‘re also funny and entertaining and just the right sort of length for this format of presenting them.
It ‘s nice that you’ve got MPB: Spaghetti as a free starter / taster for the series as well.
We ‘ll certainly be keeping these two and looking to get some more soon.
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