I received a 3-month subscription to FarFaria to facilitate this review. All opinions remain my own.

FarFaria is a “books at your fingertips” app with over 600 stories and 5 new stories added every week. Its brilliant graphics are very appealing and sure to engage most children right from the start.

Cub is almost 20 months, so a bit shy of the target age, and a bit too trigger-happy to appreciate an app that doesn’t involve a lot of interaction and moving shapes around the screen. We don’t spend a lot of time on the iPad, and certainly at this point, I much prefer reading real books with my son over reading books on a screen.

That being said, one of the little corners of the FarFaria universe is called Sing Along City. It’s like karaoke for kids! Cub is obsessed with songs, and I have discovered that I don’t know as many songs as I thought…. because I’m getting sick of the ones I know. I am happy to feed my children’s song repertoire by exploring the titles and accompanying singing in Sing Along City. As with all books in FarFaria, you can read them yourself, auto-play them by choosing “read to me,” where the child has to turn the pages to continue the story. My big beef with the sing-along books is that on auto-play, the songs still cut out when the pages turn. This makes it really annoying to listen to them, since the songs are really choppy. I’d love to see FarFaria modify this in a future update so that on auto-play mode, the songs play straight through.

There is a huge variety of stories and reading-levels in the FarFaria universe, and I see this app as something we’d use when Cub is learning to read. He will be attending school in French, so this app will be a fun way for us to practice his reading in English. The teacher in me also sees the potential of this app for children learning English as a second language.

You can try FarFaria for free, with one free book per day. There are no advertisements or surprise in-app purchases!

App Store: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/free-childrens-books-farfaria/id491771721?mt=8

Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.intuary.farfaria

Website: Farfaria.com