Reading is fairly high on our must-do-everyday-with our-daughter list. We believe it is an important skill and, as a family, we promote it early because of its many advantages.
We consider ourselves lucky enough to be approach by Farfaria to try their product. Farfaria is a paid app that gives its users access to children’s books and stories through an Android or Apple device. The genres are wide, ranging from fairytales to bedtime stories, and it’s a great tool to promote the crucial skill of reading.
We’ve been using the app for about a month now and we’ve grown to love its many features. Our findings are below:
Accessibility—all books are in the palm of your hands. As a parent, we know all too well the value of the saying
less is more, so having to do without physical books has been a great time and space saver for us.
Tiered reading—stories on Farfaria are tiered in levels: P for pre-readers (pre-school age) all the way up to 4 which are more advance. We loved that option because the app can, essentially, grow with our daughter. She can start with the basics and work her way up to more complex stories.
Auto-Read, Read-Myself, and Read-to-Me options: This is one of the great options of this app. Every story has all three of these choices. Auto-Read means the child just listens to the story and looks at the picture (the app even turns the pages for you!), while Read-Myself means my daughter and I read the whole story ourselves. Read-to-Me, however, is an option to those learning to read. It highlights the words as it is read to the child, so a bit of word and sound recognition is practiced. This is another option that grows with the user. New readers can get practice through the Read-to-Me or Auto-Read options, and as they advanced can choose the Read Myself option. It's quite fantastic!
Genres: Upon opening the app, Farfaria has its stories separated into genre “islands”, among them are fairytale, classics, adventure, etc…. This is a great option to expose children to different vocabulary words, story structures and characters. And the fact that they made it so into islands adds creativity to it. I can already imagine that when my daughter gets older, she'll have a bit of fun selecting which island she wants to explore.
Attention-getter: Every child is different, but my daughter took a long while to get used to the idea that we’ll be reading from a gadget rather than a book. For at least a week or two, all she wanted to do was grab the screen and play with it; a far cry from her behavior with books. Usually, when my husband or I read to her, she is still and (for the most part) enthralled with the story. However, because of the change of scenery, she thought we were playing a game of some sort. Like I said, it took some time to reign her in, but once we did, all was well. Again, every child is different. I would imagine using the app with much older children will go smoother than with an energetic 9 month old such as my daughter.
Farfaria is a great tool for reading. And for the price, it’s a worthy investment to have.
Disclosure | This post was sponsored by FarFaria. While I was compensated by the company to write a post about their app, my opinion regarding the product is my own and were made without any outside influences.
