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Made Up Words

I think we all do it from time to time: make up nicknames for common things in our lives. In our family it’s “jim jams” for pyjamas and “nonsense juice” for soda. Rinee Shah started a blog to collect these words from different families and illustrate them, and now you can even get the entire collection as a physical book.

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Science Fiction Books for Kids

Our eight-year-old has started to love reading and her teacher has set her a mission to read 40 books in the year. And not just any books, proper kids novels from a variety of of different genres. It’s a brilliant idea and she’s really excited about it :) Like most parents, we have plenty of awesome kids books by Dr SeussRoald Dahl and Jeff Kinney but I suddenly realised… we have zero science fiction books in the house ?

Time to fix that. We quickly went on a hunt for some really great sci-fi novels for elementary school kids. There’s some real gold out there so we thought we’d share the best ones here, so other parents can help their children be inspired by the genre.

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Scifi Audiobook Covers

If your kids are reading our books then odds are you’re reading some sci-fi books yourself!  With life being so busy I’ve found that audiobooks are the best way for me to get through my novels, but it drives me crazy how iBooks mangels book covers.  iBooks seems to be designed to fit the square music album covers from iTunes, not traditional rectangular book covers.

This year I took matters into my own hands and came up some alternate versions of popular sci-fi novels which fit iTunes much better.  If you have any of these space operas in your iTunes library use these covers instead, iBooks will love you for it!

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The Best Kids Apps of the Year

Our kids love to play on mum and dad’s iPhones, our girls started before they were one year old.  Within moderation I’m quite happy for them to play games at this age, it’s a lot more stimulating than just watching TV.  Apple recognises this growing market too and their new kids app store has made it easy to access a lot of children’s apps, but it can still be very hard to know which ones are brilliant and which are a waste of money.

Our daughters (now 3 and 6 years old) have been working hard on a three year research project: finding the best kids apps for the iPhone and iPad!  They’ve been playing testing lots of games apps, we’ve made sure they’re wholesome and spam-free, and now we’re ready to share the scores thesis with you.  So here are the top 10 best kids apps, ranked by the time our kids spend on them over the last three years.

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