| |

Living Books Are Back, and They’re Wanderful (Plus a Giveaway!)

Classic children’s books first came to life with the award-winning Living Books series. Now, key leaders on the Original Living Books team have reunited as Wanderful and have launched a new collection of iPad and iPhone apps based those engaging and multilingual interactive storybooks. Wanderful’s mission is to inspire young and emerging readers to explore the magical worlds of story and language. These interactive storybook apps deliver imaginative and fully interactive experiences for young and emerging readers through high-quality animated content loved by children, parents, teachers and homeschoolers alike.

The first four apps – “Arthur’s Teacher Trouble,” “Little Monster at School,” “The Tortoise and the Hare” and “Harry and the Haunted House” – have not only recreated the magic of Living Books, but have added new features that take full advantage of touch screen devices (the Apps will be launched on the Android Play Store later this year). Released in early October, “Harry and the Haunted House” has already won the prestigious Editor’s Choice Award from Children’s Technology Review.

Wanderful apps are highly intuitive and encourage children to explore each story and all its content. Every app features custom music, extended animation and hundreds of interactive hot spots and antics, providing a deeper experience and more interactivity on one page than other story apps offer in total. While fully interactive at the page level, each app also includes the classic “Read to Me” mode that lets young readers watch and listen to the story play automatically.

These interactive storybooks are ideal for children in the early elementary grades, and work for older or younger children as well. Each Wanderful App is fully interactive and offers a variety of settings so parents can tailor the story experience to fit the needs and learning styles of their children. Parent tips and teacher resources are also available from the “settings menu.” This level of customization is one of the reasons the apps – like the Living Books before them – have been a hit with parents of special needs children.

Each Wanderful app comes preloaded with content in English and Spanish, great for bilingual households and for children studying a second language. Children can change language from any page in the app. French can be added through and in-app upgrade.

For Homeschooling parents and teachers, every Wanderful storybook app has an associated “Classroom Activities” guide, which takes the story content and aligns it with teacher-created activities in subjects including language arts, reading, writing, math, science art. An Activities guide overview and a sample Activities guide is included with each title. The full guide is available as an in-app upgrade.

Like the original Living Books, Wanderful apps are fully interactive on each page. Tap almost any character or prop and it comes to animated life, often with musical soundtrack. Each app includes a hidden object on every page, encouraging children to fully explore the story and all its interactivity.

Each Wanderful app is $4.99 which includes the story and interactive content in both English and Spanish. French can be added for $1.99; upgrading straight to the premium version adds French and a 40-80 page Classroom Activities guide for an additional $2.99. Find Wanderful apps on iTunes.

Visit Wanderful at their website, on Facebook, and on Twitter.

The Wanderful Story

Founded by Mickey W. Mantle, the former Broderbund CTO who oversaw the technology development for the original Living Books, and with creative direction from Mark Schlichting, creator of the original Living Books and noted pioneer of the children’s multimedia and interactive design industry who serves as Wanderful’s Chief Creative Officer, Wanderful’s goal is to bring outstanding interactive storybooks to a new generation of kids on the latest multi-touch tablets and mobile devices.

Wanderful Giveaway

We’re so excited to be able to give THREE WINNERS their choice of an interactive storybook app for the iPad/iPhone from Wanderful. Each winner may pick one of the following:

Enter Here

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Similar Posts

6 Comments

  1. Oh these look great I am always looking for fun educational story’s for my kids to read when we are on the go !! 🙂

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *