Princess Fairy Tale Maker

Duck Duck Moose may well be our second-favorite app creator (after Toca Boca!). For a long time, Autumn’s favorite app was Duck Duck Moose's Itsy Bitsy Spider. Just lately though, Brooklyn has taken to fiddling with the Duck Duck Moose Princess Fairy Tale Maker. Whenever I hear classical music blasting from the backseat of the van, I know she's creating a new scene. In fact, she told me that the classical music score that accompanies the app is one of her favorite things about it; she finds the music soothing.

There are three options on opening the Princess Fairy Tale Maker: “fairy tales,” “coloring,” or “my drawings.” This is a bit misleading, as the first two are options for you to create--in Fairy Tales, you use stickers or a paint tool to draw on a scene, then have the option to record a voiceover narration. Coloring is a similar scene on which you can use your finger to fill in color, sparkles, or patterns. Any of the resulting scenes or coloring pages end up saved in My Drawings and can then be rearranged in any order to result in a story.

As always, when I purchased the app, I envisioned Brooklyn creating whole stories with it. I thought she would meticulously create each scene to build upon one another and then narrate a brilliantly-held together tale to go with it. And maybe she would if I worked on the bestselling hypothetical stories with her. But we don’t have the time. So I’ve had to adjust my expectations some. Instead of stories she creates individual scenes. Each one is new and creative. Sometimes she tells me stories to go along with the scenes; she has yet to figure out how to record these stories, but that’s okay, since they rarely make a whole lot of sense. A built-in writing prompt or two from Duck Duck Moose might have helped point her in the right direction. But hey--at least she enjoys the soothing music.