Android

Play around with four types of strolling musician groups in this app for kids. First, choose which type of band you'd like to play with -- traditional marching band, mariachi band, electronic robot band or a Japanese group or mix and match all four.  Then, drag instruments from the bottom of the screen up onto the upper part of the screen and an animated animal will start to play the instrument as they walk across the screen.  Layer in more instruments for a richer sound or play them one at at time so you know exactly what they sound like on their own.

It's not an app, but it's an excellent digital media resource and you should know about it. I discovered this podcast after it won the Excellence in Early Learning Digital Media Award from ALA and my daughter and I both love it!

It's a good time of year to go out and try ice skating, but... maybe today is too cold.  Or maybe you can't get skates?

A cooperative cooking game to play together with a group of people, each with their own screen! Combine ingredients on a plate as indicated on the "recipe" cards at the top of the screen. Once you've combined all of the ingredients, swipe the full order to the top of your screen to serve it. In the meantime, more ingredients keep appearing on your screen and they might be needed by other players in your group.  Swipe the ingredients to the right or left to share them with the other players (swipe right to share them with the player on your right, etc.).

1. Minibombo apps by TIWI s.r.l. (Google Play & iOS, best for toddlers & preschoolers)

2. Pettson's Inventions by Filimundus (Google Play, Amazon & iOS, best for school age (or preschoolers with an adult companion)

Welcome to the most complicated bakery ever!  Choose a pastry to make, then it goes into the "oven" where  players must move the pastry along a super long conveyor belt with ... complications. You might have  to press a button that bounces the pastry from one spot to the next or spin a wheel that runs an escalator slope or even get the timing just right for a swinging magnet to pick up the pastry and carry it to the next conveyor (I'm not sure what's in those pastries that makes them stick to a magnet!).

Minibombo's newest app is all about opposites. In this app, appropriate for even the youngest players, you first choose which animal you'd like to play with. Each animal then has a series of opposite options.  Players can choose whether the animal might be tall or short, for example, or far or near.  Your choice will change the appearance of the animal on the screen and then they continue to walk through the game with this new characteristic. Then they encounter another set of opposites from which to choose.

A trading game for one or two players.  In this game, you need to buy supplies for your castle. There are many options to choose from that change up the details of the game, but the basics are the same.  A boat pulls up to the dock with items for sale. You choose the items you want to buy and sell, then send the boat over to the other castle.  You can play against the app or two people can play (with the device between them, each of them looking at their own half of the screen facing them).

Here are a few apps that might help you connect with each other from afar, in order from youngest users to oldest. The first four are ones that would work well during a video call.

A "whodunit" type game that involves one player "killing" one or more other players or sabotaging the ship and killing all of the other players was NOT an app I would have expected to be reviewing and recommending here, but after my 10 year old convinced me to play it during a family game night.... I can definitely see the appeal of this game, so let's talk about it.  First of all, you should know that the premise is simple -- players are members of a crew in space, but one person (or two people depending on settings chosen) has randomly been identified (by the game) as the Imposter (i.e.