Guest Post - Michelle Robinson tells us about her fave App!

Here's a guest post by bonkers as a bag of chimps author  Michelle Robinson on her favourite  app for kids!

DO NOT LICK SCREEN!
Nighty Night HD (watch the video here..) 

 'Night falls. The moon is high, all the people are ready to sleep as they turn off the lights…'

 

And so begins the Night Garden-esque narration of this enchanting bedtime app. Everything about it is beautiful; sound, vision; and that magical quality you can't quite put your finger on. It oozes naturally from all great ideas - and this is one of them.

It's so simple it's perfect: go around the candy cane cottage-style farm saying goodnight to all the animals and switching off the lights. That's it. Simple, eh? I'll bet putting it together was anything but. Heidi Wittlinger's delightful animals live in a farm painstakingly constructed from wood, cardboard, wool, straw and even bits of old sponge. I love it. My two and a half year old loves it. The stars twinkle, the crickets make that cricketty noise, the cutesy animals drift off to sleep and I have to restrain myself from licking the screen.

As a picture book author I love the purity of this idea and the quality of its execution. This is why picture book apps are such an exciting prospect - we can do things on an interactive screen that we could never truly replicate in print. If you're sucking your teeth, answer me this: how could a child turn off the lights in such a satisfying way on paper? I've seen lights-out spreads (Peggy Rathmann's 'Goodnight Gorilla' has a great one), but it's just not the same as actually finding a switch and clicking it.
 
This is the perfect bedtime app for animal crazy toddlers like mine, who is especially fond of the pony (and by the way, even though their absence isn't noticeable until you've met them, it's absolutely worth buying the optional additional animals because they're adorable). At the end of a hectic day, Nighty Night is a lovely way of putting the iPad to bed and switching into 'Proper Book' mode. After all, as much as Nighty Night claims to be a 'bedtime book', it doesn't have a story. If it did, I'd give it a standing ovation. As it is, it gets a high five and a hearty 'WHOOP.'

BUY this app here..

A big licky THANK YOU to Laap-dog Michelle Robinson - Check out Michelle's author page on Facebook here or visit her website if you are really up for a giggle follow her on Twitter @MicheRobinson.. yarf yarf!