I just had to share a bit of news with you all! My very artistic and creative husband (who was the one to draw the banner design for this blog) just finished the art for a digital musical children's storybook app. It's called Mibblio. Mibblio is actually a storybook platform for various stories, and my husband illustrated the story called The Mashed Potato Monster Gang.
My kids love to have stories read to them, and there are plenty of apps out there that do just that. Some, I've found, are better than others.
What makes this particular app different is that the stories are put to music AND the parent child can play along to the music.
You can see from the picture above how many different play-along options there are: a keyboard, strings, and rhythm instruments. For each of these, the "voice" can be changed. The keyboard can sound like a piano, xylophone, accordion, guitar, violin, saxophone, clarinet or flute. The strings can sound like an electric guitar, acoustic guitar, ukelele, harp, or banjo. The percussion instruments also have a huge selection. The child can also turn off and on the various instruments used in the music to the story (by pressing those buttons along the left side of the window) - which is a really cool way to play with instrument identification in a song. And if this is all too much, you can listen to the musical story without the interactive instrumentation (though I don't know why you would do this - it is too much fun to play along).
In playing along, I particularly love that they thought of how these instruments will sound with the composed music - and for the items like the string instruments, each time the chord changes, the chord played by those instruments follows along - so it always sounds great. If you have a few different children listening to the story, they can each pick their instrument to play - you can have a regular hootenanny while listening to your story!
What we are most excited about is that this is my husband's first "published" work. It's always been a dream for him to get published. Especially if you have kids (and even if you don't), check it out and let me know what you think!!!
