I imagine

I imagine by bizzibrains is a free interactive picturebook for preschoolers. Before reading the story, you have to build the characters. You get to choose hair, clothes and a face for a parent, a child, and the child's toy. And then you can save up to three sets of characters. The best part for us was using the iPad's camera to create the characters' faces. Autumn and I made silly faces, switched bodies so that she was the adult and I was the kid, and generally enjoyed ourselves with this. You also get to name the characters both in print and in the voiceover, so of course everyone ended up with names from Frozen or The Swan Princess.

Once you have designed the characters, they get inserted into an e-book. The story is simple: a parent is trying to work--and the term "work" is employed loosely here, as the parent figure is sometimes seen doing laundry, and sometimes sitting at a computer--but whatever the parent is doing, the child wants attention. The caretaker (in our case, Odette, with Autumn's face) tries various ways of occupying the child (Kristof, with my face)... a train set, a sandbox, arts and crafts... Finally, she sends the child to her room, where the kid stops whining, exercises her imagination, and begins to have fun with her toy doll.

I have minor quibbles with the app--for example, there doesn't seem to be any way to turn back a page--but overall, Autumn loves it. There is interaction on every page that is germane to the storyline. The text tracking matches the narration. And the story is cohesive, if slim.

Brooklyn looked over our shoulder briefly as we were playing, but she didn't get a chance to try the app out yet. I don't think it will hold a six-year-old's attention quite as long as it did the three-year-old's. She will enjoy making the characters too, but the story won't hold up for repeated tellings. But that is okay--this is a great app for younger kids. Critics like the educational columnist Annie Murphy Paul have criticized e-books for stunting children's imagination and not being easy to share (see her rant in the School Library Journal), but Autumn and I found this app an excellent vehicle for sharing and stimulating conversation. While we did talk about mechanics quite a bit like how to make the app work, we also discussed richer things, like what to draw on the arts and crafts page; when and where Autumn has made sand castles on the sandbox page; and what Autumn would play with her dolls if she was alone and amusing herself in her room.

In all, Autumn and I spent about half an hour with the app last night. She was engaged and talkative the entire time. Which is more than I can say for her behavior when we are reading some of her print books together. I firmly believe that e-books are not necessarily terrible for younger readers; the trick is to match the right book to the reader and to actively share the book together. I imagine makes that easy to do.