In an age of smartphones and tablets, getting your kids to listen to stories as you read out to them may be a bit of a challenge. Arguably, gone are the days when parents lulled their kids to sleep with books on their lap. That is especially so because children nowadays are used to spending a big chunk of their time on mobile devices, playing mobile games and watching YouTube videos.
Fortunately, there are apps out there that are meant to help preserve the tradition of bedtime stories, albeit in a digital format. Apart from their educational use, digital storytelling can help to stimulate creativity and critical thinking in your kids. In this post, we aim to provide you with a list of the best storytelling apps for kids of all age groups in multiple languages. Without further ado, let’s take a look at them.
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Multilingual storytelling app
Well, before we hop into language-specific storytelling apps for kids, let’s first check out the one app that is not only simple but offers content in all languages.
YouTube Kids
YouTube Kids was developed with learning and fun in mind, and it supports multiple languages. Kids can watch their favorite shows and music as well as learn anything they want. The app contains filters and is monitored by human reviewers to keep the videos in YouTube Kids family-friendly.
One of its major features is the Kids Profile which allows you to create up to eight kid profiles, each featuring their own viewing preferences, video recommendations, and settings.
Storytelling apps for kids in English
Many storytelling apps that come in droves from Google Play are mostly in the English language, with some including translations in other languages to cater to those who don’t use English as their mother tongue. Here’s a couple of them:
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Moral Stories
If you are into reading stories out to your kids than creating one, then the Moral Stories app is the right choice for you. The educational app contains more than a hundred stories gathered from various sources that are fictional in nature but gives more lessons to kids.
The good thing about these stories is that they can be accessed even with no internet connection, so your kids can enjoy bedtime stories anywhere.
Download: Moral Stories
English Stories
This app offers an extensive collection of short English stories in various categories such as comedy, suspense, humor, inspirational, ancient and moral stories for your little one to choose from. Make your child listen to these short english stories in order to improve their command over the language with improved vocabulary and speaking skills. The app is not just for your little one but also for you as it also has a collection of famous romantic novels that you can read offline at your convenience.
Download: English Stories
Toontastic 3D
Released in January last year by Google as part of its Launchpad Toys acquisition, Toontastic 3D lets your kids create their own cartoons and narrate their stories by just moving the characters around on the screen. Kids can draw a wide variety of characters ranging from robots, pirates, and more.
Using the app’s native 3D drawing tools, children of all ages can design their characters. If they feel like figuring themselves into the story, kids can also add their photos to the story and be part of it. Toontastic also works to record the voice and animations of your kids and stores them on their our device as a 3D video.
Anitales
“““Anitales, an app developed by Mibao Information Technology Ltd., is meant to serve either as a cartoon story maker or cartoon video creator. It allows kids to create their own story and customize up to 3 avatars. Kids also have the ability to export their cartoon story to video and share it with friends and/or families.
Aside from being a story maker, Anitales can also double as a cartoon story reader with which your kids can read or watch thousands of animated cartoon stories and cartoon movies. The app lets you compose up to 1 million animations and pick from a wide variety of scenes, weathers, skies, props, and soundtracks.
Download: Anitales
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Hindi storytelling apps
Aside from storytelling apps in English, other similar apps are also available in other languages like Hindi. Some of those apps are available from the Google Play Store, though there’s only a few of them, including:
Kahaniya: Hindi Audio Stories
Let your child explore the hindi audiobook collection with Kahaniya. The app puts forward an extensive list of suspense, romantic, comedy and thrillers to be an engaging source of entertainment for your kids. You can pick from a range of educational or historic short stories to begin a fun learning session for your little one.
The audio story feature topped by the offline reading experience makes the app desirable for both parents and kids.
Download: Kahaniya
Hindi Story Book 2
Hindi Story Book 2 includes more than 450 Hindi stories that feature a variety of moral lessons. The stories come from famous Chandamama Magazine, which immerses readers in the Indian culture. If you’re living in India and want your kids to get insights into the country’s culture, you should grab the free app from Google Play right now.
Download: Hindi Story Book 2
Storytelling apps in Spanish
Aside from storytelling apps with text as the medium, there are other apps as well that tell stories using audio, with some of them being available in other languages. If your kid prefers stories in Spanish, then Google Play has a few apps in store for him or her such as:
Spanish Audio Stories
The Spanish audio stories comes with over 1000 audio stories to enjoy in native Spanish audio language. The app features a simple UI with a soothing text format to learn the basics of Spanish. You can listen to your desired audiobook or read the text along for understanding the basics of Spanish. However, you cannot change the speed of audio that may turn out to be an issue for native speakers.
Download: Spanish Audio Stories
French storytelling apps
Finally, French storytelling apps can also be downloaded from the Google Play Store. Aside from telling stories, the app’s goal is to help those who wish to learn French by reading tales.
Easy French Stories
The audiobook contains French-English vocabulary under each paragraph so that you can focus on your reading without bothering to open a French dictionary. It also includes natural dialogs and high-frequency words and expressions to let your kids enjoy reading and learn new grammatical structures.
Download: Easy French Stories
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French Short Stories
Short French Stories contains educational and motivational stories with moral lessons. The stories can help your kids improve their reading comprehension skills and develop their prowess in the French language as well.
However, genres may include horror, suspense, love and romance, though majority of the stories are children and animal stories. The app allows users to save a story as favorite and read it later as well as share a favorite on social media. There’s also an option to zoom in on the text in the story.
Download: French Short Stories
Conclusion
So there you have it! If you feel that we missed other great storytelling apps in any language, feel free to comment below.
