Kidloland Review: the singing educational app

Screenshot of Kidloland opening screen with text "KidloLand Nursery Rhymes, Songs & Games For Kids"

KidloLand is aimed at children aged 0-5 and claims to be "The perfect preschool companion for your child". This educational app is full of songs and animations to help children learn without realising. It includes songs to teach the alphabet, phonetics, colours, shapes, months, days and general knowledge. It even teaches children how to count to ten (well 100 actually).

Screen from the back of a young girl watching the KidloLand app 3 Little Kittens song
The app is available to download for free with a small amount of content and full access through a subscription (which includes future material). We received a free subscription to the full app and after playing with it for a few weeks here is what my daughters and I thought of it:

My view


Accessing the App
The free activities give you enough of a taste to decide if you like the app or not. When you go into each section for the first time you have to download the content (and you can also delete it which is great to manage the space on your device). You will need to make sure you download everything you want before you take it travelling with you, but once downloaded the app doesn't need internet access.

Learning through the medium of song
There is a huge amount of material on this app, primarily in the form of song, but with activities and games too. I found a lot of the material repetitive, but I recognise this is how children learn and I'm not exactly the target user for the app eg Old MacDonald the entrepreneur has a farm, jungle, circus, bird park, aquarium and zoo. The characters are bright, colourful and amusing and many of them will respond when tapped.
KidloLand screenshots including the letter A, August, Pineapple and some colouring in (of a beehive)

Categories:
The categories of KidloLand: Nursery Rhymes, ABCD Songs, phonics, Activities, Old MacDonald songs, Vehicles, Animal Kingdom, Fruit & Vegetables, Row the boat, Numbers, Lullabies, Colours and Shapes, Month and days, Games and Christmas Songs
All of these are songs except Activities and Games.

I like that you can set up a playlist of up to 25 songs for younger children so they can just watch those or you can give older children the opportunity to navigate the whole app. To exit the playlist you need to hold down the back button for 2 seconds which helps prevent little fingers exiting it.

I also think it's great that unlike many educational apps this isn't full of American terms and accents which is really important to me on an educational app because of the pronunciation.
Some screenshots of games in KidloLand

M's view (at nearly 5 years old)

M is at the top of the age range that the app is aimed at. She knows her alphabet, numbers, colours and shapes, but she still really enjoys this app. While we were on holiday our DisneyLife app stopped working so she didn't have any programmes to watch. After a bit of a meltdown the Kidloland app became her favourite and we had absolutely no problems using it without internet or in a foreign country.
Young girl on iPad on an aeroplane
Flying high with KidloLand

Little's view (at nearly 6 months)

When M has been playing the songs without her headphones the music has grabbed Little's attention and she will happily watch the animations with M.
Screenshots of KidloLand Old MacDonalds including in the Jungle and the Aquarium

Summary

This app is easy to use, colourful and entertaining. Based on our testing this app appeals to children from 5 months to 5 years. I have to admit that I have learnt a few things too, do you know what noise a panda makes? I do now.
At $39.99 a year the subscription is pricey, but should be worth it if your child uses it regularly. You can start off with a month's subscription if you want to be sure before committing.

It's available from
The App Store
Google Play
Amazon Apps


Small Print
We were given a full subscription to the KidloLand app for the purposes of this review, but all views and comments above are mine (and my daughter's).
The images in this post (other than the photographs) are screenshots of the app and property of Kidloland. The photographs are mine and property of Counting To Ten.

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