Smart Tales: Kids ABC Learning

What is Smart Tales app?

Smart Tales is a general learning app emphasising STEM topics. While these topics provide themes for the games, stories, and activities, the app helps with reading, letter formation, and other early literacy skills. In addition, many of its stories touch on social and emotional learning themes.

Smart Tales has the following key features:

• Beautiful graphics and animations encourage kids to play and explore as they learn about STEM topics, early reading skills, and social and emotional issues
• Narrated content and well-considered accessibility features to support users with literacy or vision difficulties
• A personalised programme of study to match each child's needs and wants
• Parental/teacher support features such as usage tracking and additional printable content.

Smart Tales has won multiple awards, and we have previously certified it as a five-star app, but now the app has added lots of new content and polished the old, we thought it was time to review it again and see how it has developed.

What we love about Smart Tales app

The individual features in Stem Tales might not be especially unique, but the quality of their execution and how they cleverly work together make it an excellent app. We'd rather see tried and tested game styles implemented effectively than ineffective ones chosen for originality's sake — especially as everything is original to young kids!

The stories and activities have narration, making the app great for independent learning, but their unpressured nature also ensures the app works well as a shared learning experience for parent and child or teacher-led teaching.

With already sizable content and its developer adding more over time, Smart Tales has the potential to hook kids for long-term STEM learning.

What skills does it teach?

Smart Tales introduces young kids to STEM topics, assists early literacy skills, and promotes social and emotional development.

What age is it appropriate for?

Smart Tales has activities suitable for kids aged between two and six. The app will be most appropriate if you introduce it to kids under five so they have higher-level content to progress towards.

Is Smart Tales app easy to use?

Smart Tales is easy for parents to set up for their kids. They can register an account to enable the app's use with more than one child.

The app uses plenty of narration to help kids who might be unable to read instructions, and the navigation elements are icon-based. The app rewards experimentation with lots of hidden animations and responses.

Smart Tales goes further than many other educational apps to support users with accessibility. We didn't see any instances of the app using colour as an exclusive means of conveying information, and combined with built-in colour blindness filters, it should not exclude any kids with colour-vision challenges.

The app also has an option for a dyslexia-friendly font. While not every person with dyslexia finds these helpful, they don't do any harm, and those who find them supportive will appreciate their inclusion.

Smart Tales also displays an Autism approved badge.

How will students benefit?

Kids will love the variety in Smart Tales. The content and the presentation have many different aspects. With facts, skills, and thinking points presented as stories, games, and sandbox activities, kids won't feel a sense of repetition in the app.

Smart Tales keeps kids engaged further with the rewards of character-based stickers. Each new addition comes with extra content and animations to distract kids before they return to the main app content.

How will parents benefit?

The app has seasonal content that parents could find useful to support their kids through stimulating or stressful times. For example, when we reviewed the app during the back-to-school period, the app had a story linked to it. Parents could use this material to help kids think about and resolve their worries.

Homeschooling parents will appreciate the included subscription to more than 300 printable PDF worksheets. These are good quality and provide a linked but separate resource to support their kids' learning with the app.

How will teachers benefit?

Smart Tales has a dedicated teachers' section on its website to help you get the most from the app.

The suggestions and guidance given in the app's guides could help it become a great planning timesaver for busy teachers. The stories in Smart Tales support thematic learning and will form an engaging multimedia platform to build a series of lessons.

The printable resources are also valuable for teachers, and using them will further reduce planning time while linking directly with the digital content.

What can Smart Tales app improve on?

The stories in Smart Tales typically use rhyming couplets. There are pros and cons to this. It can create an engaging rhythm that some kids like.

However, rhyming can also force awkward sentence structures to ensure the sentence ends on the required rhyme. In a few places, the writer seems to have based the rhyme purely on the spelling rather than the word's pronunciation. Food and good might look like they should rhyme, but they don't.

Both the sentence structure issue and false rhyming could confuse early readers getting used to the English language's inconsistencies.

Some apps look for evidence of interaction when tracking usage time, and we'd like to see Smart Tales do this to avoid a false usage reading from kids leaving the app open but untouched.

How much does Smart Tales app cost?

You can download Smart Tales for free and access the full content for seven days as part of a trial. The longer trial periods offer the best value over time, and as Smart Tales periodically adds new content, your kids will never have seen everything.

Is Smart Tales app safe to use?

Smart Tales asks permission to send notifications you can accept or reject without harming the play experience. Parents should open the app for the first time to enter their email address to create a user account. The user account is essential to use the app across multiple devices.

There are no advertisements in any of the Smart Tales subscription tiers.

Overall rating of the app.

Smart Tales pulls together several threads found in other early-learning apps. Its games use simple mechanics like most of those apps but gain a new dimension as they integrate with the stories and animations. The entertaining stories link directly to curriculum content addressing basic knowledge and early literacy skills.

Whether you are a teacher or parent, we recommend downloading Smart Tales and trying the free trial with your kids. We have awarded Smart Tales five stars.

You can download Smart Tales: Kids ABC Learning on your iOS or Android devices from the app stores. Download the Smart Tales: Kids ABC Learning app from the Apple App Store or the Google Play Store.