Sue’s Focus Travels
LQ: 7.95
Recommended Age: 4+
Skills Used: Focus, Time Management, Mathematics, Writing
LearningWorks for Kids
Find the best apps and games for learning, personally selected for each unique child.
Mini-Guide: Disney Story Realms
Platform/Console: Android, iPad, iPhone, iPod
LWK Recommended Age: Any
Thinking Skills Used: Focus, Working Memory
Academic Skills Used: Reading
Disney Story Realms is an app that blends reading books with playing short digital games. Each story comes with a book to read and multiple games you can play. One of the free books, for example, is Beauty and the Beast. The app tells how long the book is, what age kids it is geared to, what characters are in the story, and what games are available. The user can choose to read the book or play the games. When reading Beauty and the Beast, the book is broken into chapters. This allows the user to skip to favorite parts or read it across multiple sittings. To play the games, the user moves Belle around her village and discovers things like puzzles, word searches, dress up, and other simple games.
Disney Story Realms has a small amount of free content, as well as subscriptions to unlock the rest of the books. The ESRB rated it E for Everyone and LW4K stands by this rating. Stories available include princesses, Mickey and Friends, and even Disney Pixar movies like Toy Story. There are also collections such as “Holiday Stories” or “Spooky Stories”.
Disney Story Realms helps kids practice and improve the following skills:
Focus
Getting started and then maintaining attention and effort to tasks.
Whether the user is reading one of the books or playing one of the mini-games, they will need to use their focus skills. Since the mini-games are all short, they will be using short-term focus, ignoring both internal and external distractions for short amounts of time. The books all have varying lengths, which means that the user’s focus will be stretched and practiced at varying lengths. No matter what the user does, they will be using their focus skills.
Working Memory
Recalling and retaining information in our minds while working.
While individual mini-games may use different thinking skills, every game in this app uses working memory by asking the user to remember and follow directions. Each game has a different set of instructions. If the user doesn’t remember what the rules are for a mini-game, they won’t be able to complete the game.
Related Apps+
Shonen Jump
LQ: 9.55
Recommended Age: 12+
Skills Used: Flexibility, Focus, Reading
Focus Tomato
LQ: 8.85
Recommended Age: 4+
Skills Used: Focus, Time Management, Mathematics
Tomato Timer
LQ: 8.5
Recommended Age: 4+
Skills Used: Focus, Time Management, Mathematics
All the World
LQ: 9.05
Recommended Age: 4–10
Skills Used: Flexibility, Focus
Habit Rabbit
LQ: 9.2
Recommended Age: 4+
Skills Used: Focus, Organization, Mathematics, Writing
Plantie
LQ: 8.95
Recommended Age: 4+
Skills Used: Focus, Time Management, Mathematics
ASL Kids
LQ: 9.68
Recommended Age: 1+
Skills Used: Focus, Working Memory, Reading
Lake
LQ: 9.45
Recommended Age: 4+
Skills Used: Focus, Self-Control
ASL With Carebears
LQ: 9.35
Recommended Age: 4+
Skills Used: Focus, Working Memory, Reading
Tally
LQ: 8.85
Recommended Age: 4+
Skills Used: Focus, Self-Control
Canticos Bilingual Preschool
LQ: 9.65
Recommended Age: 2–5
Skills Used: Focus, Working Memory, Mathematics, Reading, Writing
