Kids Bedtime Stories & Rhymes

Kids Bedtime Stories & Rhymes is a story app for children aged three to eight. It holds 59 fairy tales and folk tales told as gentle animated films, 29 fables with a lesson, 20 everyday adventure stories, 39 nursery rhymes to sing along with, and Make a Story, where a child builds a picture book of their own and reads it aloud in their own voice. Home is a painted Story World. The castle keeps the fairy tales, the owl's tree the fables, the little town the everyday adventures and the stage the rhymes. Down in the workshop the child makes stories. In the middle, one story is already chosen for tonight. A child taps a place, picks a cover and listens; nothing scrolls sideways and nothing asks to be collected. The fairy tales are the ones you grew up with and some you may not know yet: Goldilocks and the Three Bears, The Three Little Pigs, The Gingerbread Man and The Ugly Duckling, next to Anansi from Ghana, Momotaro from Japan, Sang Kancil from Malaysia and Tiddalik the thirsty frog from Australia. Forty-nine of them are animated. The painted characters walk, climb and hide while a warm voice reads the tale from beginning to end, about three minutes each. The fables are short and end on one small idea: The Thirsty Crow, The Boy Who Cried Wolf, The Fox and the Grapes, The Little Red Hen, Birbal's Khichdi, The Hummingbird and the Forest Fire. The everyday adventures follow Leo and Mia through things young children really do for the first time: a visit to the doctor, the first day of school, a first flight, a haircut, a trip to the dentist. The rhymes are sung, and each one is acted out in its own little scene: Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, Humpty Dumpty, Old MacDonald Had a Farm, Row Row Row Your Boat, Five Little Ducks, Baa Baa Black Sheep, Hickory Dickory Dock and thirty-two more. Make a Story is a story maker for kids. Choose a place, a castle, a beach, a jungle or outer space, then drag in characters, animals, vehicles and treasures from more than 1,500 painted pieces. Add a line of words to each page and record your own voice reading it, and the finished book plays back like the stories on the shelf. To start quickly, open one of 20 sample stories, such as The Tortoise and the Hare, Stone Soup or Blast Off!, read it, then tap the pencil to make it your own. The starter pieces download by themselves; ten more sets (animals, people, vehicles, space, food, landmarks, nature and others) download when you choose them. For parents there is a corner behind a quick times-table question. From there you choose which stories appear and set a daily screen-time limit, so the stories stop by themselves at bedtime. Children never see a setting, a pop-up or an error. Is it free? Yes. There are no advertisements, no purchases inside the app and no accounts to make. Does it work offline? Yes, once the stories have downloaded it works without a connection, in the car, on a plane or in a bedroom with the Wi-Fi off. Do recordings leave the phone? No. Voice recordings are kept on the device, and the app collects no data. What age is it for? Three to eight: the stories are told at a pace a three-year-old can follow, and building a book is something an eight-year-old still enjoys. What language is it in? English. Made by Potpourri Apps, a small studio making quiet apps for young children.