KinderBach Music App {Review}

It’s app review time. I guess it’s been a little while since I’ve talked about iPad apps. In fact, it’s been a little while since I’ve talked about iPads at all! Earlier this fall Chloe accidentally dropped the iPad 2 (*sob*) thereby causing major screen distortion. It still worked, but it was definitely wonky. Two weeks later she dropped it again (!!!!) and you know what? The second drop set the screen back to normal again. We called her lucky and told her she wasn’t allowed to ever touch the iPad again. We were kidding. Kind of. Okay, we were kidding. But she’s been super careful with it ever since…

Okay getting on with the review. A few weeks ago we were introduced to KinderBach and given a code to download the entire paid version of their iPad app. Unfortunately, there was a problem with the app for quite a while and it only got remedied about a week ago. My younger girls did have some time to explore the app within the past week, but we were not able to go through the entire series of lessons.

Basically the KinderBach App is an interactive music curriculum for younger kids. It’s designed with the 3-7 year old student in mind. My kids are slightly older than that, but not so much that they couldn’t benefit from it. We did breeze through some of the early lessons and focused on some of the later ones to get a better idea of content. The main ideas are taught through videos. The piano keyboard you see in the photo above really plays like a keyboard does. Also provided are interactive coloring pages and various music games. The main ideas conveyed include:

• identifying music direction and pitch
• learning rhythm notes and their beat value
• not reading by pattern for voice and keyboard

There are a total of three levels with ten lessons each. This translates to 150 videos of lesson content in addition to all the activities/games within each level. The games are interesting enough to keep kids wanting to try the various ones that are offered, but we did notice glitches in two of the games – one of them is slow to recognize when the student touches the right answer, thus giving the child an “oops” kind of response. Another game just didn’t load. *Most* of the games we tried were just fine, but there were those occasional issues I wanted to be honest about here.

Overall, I think the concept is a good one for the intended age group. The full version of the app is $26.99 and, while I know how much content the full version covers, I would highly encourage anyone considering this to first download the trial version which includes the first two lessons and the first game for free. From there you have the option to purchase individual lessons one at a time.

So, those are the Half-Pint House thoughts on this. Be sure to check out what the rest of the TOS Homeschool Crew had to say about this and the KinderBach online version as well.

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