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Kids Making Healthy Choices: An app with lifelong positive consequences
Kids Making Healthy Choices is a US$2.99 app based on an award-winning set of children books designed to promote healthy eating, teach tolerance of overweight friends (so bullying can be avoided), and instill a respect for health and well-being through fun and educational games and activities. The app includes the complete e-books (one for boys, one for girls) that are designed to inspire kids to eat right and keep the weight off. There is a discussion section in the app where parents and kids can talk about the concepts presented. A Fun Activities section offers up fun puzzles, Word Scrambles and Connect the Dots exercises. Also included are recipes, online tools and resources, with links to articles, news headlines, and other stories for parents to read. The e-books are self-contained and don't require web access, while some of the other features do require internet service. If you can get your child to participate -- no small feat -- this information should be valuable, especially for younger and more impressionable children. The material is well organized, and the book never talks down to readers. The recipes offer good ideas, covering the normal three daily meals and some recipes for smacks. Those recipes lack illustrations, and it would probably be easier to get a kid excited about something good to eat if you could show them a picture of it. The other problem with the Kids Making Healthy Choices app, which I see all too often, is that it works only in portrait mode. Especially on the iPad, that's a problem. Many people use their iPads in landscape orientation and the app just won't work that way. Being able to use an app in landscape mode is important because some iPad cases with stands are only designed to to work in that orientation. App creators should not force customers to hold their device in a particular way -- it's just lazy programming or a lack of awareness of how people use iDevices. Still, Kids Making Healthy Choices is a good app. It's loaded with information and resources that will help parents and kids both get a needed awareness of nutrition and health. It's worth the price being asked, especially since the included books cost more on their own than this app. The app requires iOS 6 or later, it's universal, and optimized for the iPhone 5.
