Kindergarten Learning Games 5+

It starts with a map.

Not a menu and not a grid of buttons. A watercolor kingdom seen from the sky, with a castle in the middle, villages scattered over the hills, a harbor on the coast and ten small islands out at sea. A child taps a village, the camera flies down into it, and the games that live there rise up on a parchment board.

EVERY VILLAGE TEACHES ONE THING, AND LOOKS LIKE IT

At Math Harbor, adding means craning crates onto a cargo boat and counting what is aboard. At Little School, letter sounds, blending, sight words and first spelling happen on a chalkboard. Puzzle Peak is for thinking: turn the pipes until the water reaches the wheel, finish the royal jigsaw, untangle the paths. Memory Grove hides its pairs behind little round doors in a tree. Number Bay, Shape Hills, Cozy Farm, Busy Town, Nature Trail, Jungle Trail, Music Meadow, Art Village, the Fun Fair and Explore & Find each have their own ground, their own sounds and their own games. There are more than 150 games across fourteen villages, and each one is staged as its own little place.

NOVA COMES ALONG

Nova is a small elephant in an orange cap. In the Arcade, Nova rides a scooter, flies a kite, pilots a rocket and paddles a raft, and the learning does the steering. Ride through the gate with the right number. Blast the asteroid with the right letter. Catch the letters that spell the word. Twenty-six quick games where the answer is the move.

MORAL STORIES FROM AROUND THE WORLD

Twenty-nine fables, each told as a living storybook: the thirsty crow dropping pebbles into a jar, the four friends of the Panchatantra, Birbal's khichdi, the frog who lived in a well, the hummingbird who would not stop carrying water. Characters walk, leap and talk across watercolor scenes while the story is read aloud, and each ends with one small question to think about, with two pictures to choose from. Greece, India, China, Japan, Korea, the Arab world, Russia, Denmark and the Andes are all on the shelf.

THE QUIET PLACES

Daily Adventures holds twenty picture books, illustrated page by page and read aloud: a first trip to the dentist, a day at the farm, the school bus, the supermarket. Karaoke Night has forty-nine nursery rhymes, sung, with every word lighting up at the moment it is sung, so a child who cannot read yet starts following the words anyway. The ten Learning Islands are for wandering: touch any picture, an animal, a festival, a feeling, a fire engine, and hear its name. Nothing is scored there and nothing is timed. The Art Studio has over a hundred watercolor pages to color, Puzzles has four hundred painted jigsaws in ten worlds, and there is a piano as well.

WHAT A KINDERGARTNER ACTUALLY PRACTISES

Letter sounds, blending, rhyming families, sight words, spelling and first sentences. Counting to 100, number bonds, adding and taking away, place value, comparing, measuring, money and telling the time. Shapes, patterns, sorting, sequences, memory and logic. Animals and their homes, life cycles, weather and seasons, the body and the senses, the solar system, and the people who help in a town. Each game has levels that step up as a child gets things right.

FOR THE GROWN-UP HOLDING THE PHONE

There are no ads in this app and nothing to buy. There is no account to create. It collects no data and sends nothing about your child anywhere. The stories, puzzles and songs download once after install; from then on everything is on the device, so it works on a plane, in a car, or anywhere without a signal. Nothing within a child's reach leads out of the app. Behind a grown-ups-only gate you will find your child's progress by subject, a weekly report, a daily screen-time limit and switches for which places are open.

Made by Potpourri Apps, a small independent studio, for ages 5 to 7: kindergarten, reception and the first year of school.

Recent changes:
The kingdom has been redrawn from the sky. The home screen is now one big watercolor map: tap a village and fly down into it, sail out to ten learning islands, or visit Nova's arcade.

Eighty games have been rebuilt, each as its own little place, from a cargo crane at Math Harbor to the water pipes on Puzzle Peak. Every game has a new painted tile that shows what you do in it. Voices take turns now instead of talking over each other, and the map is smoother to zoom.