The “Make a Face” game uses the front-facing camera in the iPhone 4 and iPad 2 (or later) so that you can copy Pip and Posy’s expressions – sad, happy, laughing, everyone’s favourite – monster – and more, and then take pictures of the results. If you have an older iPad or iPhone, you can still play the game, if a second person holds your device for you.
Once you’ve struck your best pose, you can save the picture to your “Photos” folder or take a screenshot by holding down both the Home and Power buttons – and then you can enter by posting a link to the photo in the comments below, tweeting it to us @NosyCrowApps, or emailing it to apps@nosycrow.com.
The competition closes on Sunday and Pip and Posy will be on sale on iTunes for only $0.99/ £0.69 until then! You can find the app on iTunes here.
Last week, The Three Little Pigs turned one, and we marked the occasion with a weekend price promotion. This week we have an even more exciting birthday to celebrate – our own! Nosy Crow turned two on Wednesday (a blogpost on the subject from Kate may be forthcoming), and as well as enjoying frankly absurd quantities of cake (Kate made an excellent clementine one, and Michelle from Imago brought in a magnificent chocolate and raspberry affair), we thought this time we’d launch a promotion for our most recent app, Bizzy Bear on the Farm. Today and all this weekend you can buy the app on iTunes for the special price of $1.99/ £1.49/ €1.59 (here’s the link).
The app has been fantastically well-received. It won the Editor’s Choice Award from Children’s Technology Review. The Guardian wrote “There’s loads of easy and satisfying interactivity in telling the story of Bizzy Bear’s farm visit … Simple interactivity creates multiple permutations of text which encourages careful listening and makes repeating the familiar activities full of surprises.” The Literary Platform said “Young children will love this app. It’s bright, fun and engaging with plenty to keep little fingers occupied.” And in the New York Times’ Gadgetwise blog, it’s described as “Full of clever talking animals and barnyard jobs that include gathering eggs, herding sheep and riding a horse. Every page has hidden surprises that support the story.”
So if you haven’t tried Bizzy Bear on the Farm yet, now’s the perfect opportunity – help us celebrate our birthday, and help Bizzy out on the farm!
It’s particularly gratifying as last year, both Cinderella and The Three Little Pigs were recipients of the award, which is given in recognition of outstanding quality and value in children’s media products.
In their review, by The New York Times’ Gadgetwise blogger Warren Buckleitner, the Review write that Bizzy Bear is “another excellent Nosy Crow app … the narration by children is professionally done, and the activities work well to support the story.”
If you haven’t tried out Bizzy Bear on the Farm yet, you can buy it here – and if you have, we’d love to know what you think, so please send us your reviews on iTunes, Facebook, or Twitter.
We are thrilled to announce that our third highly-interactive storybook app, Bizzy Bear on the Farm, is now available on the App Store for iPad, iPhone and iPod touch.
Using the touchscreen, children aged two and up can explore the farm and help Bizzy Bear with all his chores. They can, for example, feed the pigs, put sheep into their pen, pick apples, gather eggs and drive the tractor!
This is our first app based on a Nosy Crow book series – our popular Bizzy Bear board books for children. But we’re not just squashing the books onto a phone or tablet. While the board books feature chunky tabs to push and pull, the app includes lots more simple ways for little fingers to explore the story, and the words are different too. The children’s voices reading the story, the farmyard sound effects and the specially-composed music make things even more fun.
We’re excited to bring the interactive features we’ve developed in apps (like The Three Little Pigs and Cinderella) for slightly older children to a younger audience.
The app is designed for toddlers and focuses on listening skills, following directions, and completing tasks. Bizzy responds to every touch with encouragement and help.
Now that Summer is most certainly upon us (evidenced at Nosy Crow by the fact that almost everyone is on holiday), the ritual of reading round-ups has been getting its yearly airing in the press. Without wanting to look a gift horse in the mouth – we’ve been very pleased with the inclusion of our books in so many round-ups – there seems to me to be something a little… unsatisfactory about the criteria for these lists. Surely, in order to qualify as a great Summer read, a book ought to have more going for it than a recent publication date.
There is, of course, all kinds of ways one could choose to define a good Summer book. Some – like our Mega Mash-Up series – are brilliant for keeping children occupied on long journeys or during days at home. Others, like Noodle Loves the Beach and Bizzy Bear: Off We Go!, evoke Summer quite literally. And stories like Dinosaur Dig! somehow encapsulate the outdoorsy, spirit-of-adventure feeling that Summer represents when you’re young – or, as Camilla put it to me in an email from the road, “Summer is about liberation isn’t it – from school, parents and routine, and in theory, the weather.”
When I asked for everyone’s suggestions here (before they all left), we decided to restrict ourselves to books that actually take place over the Summer. Needless to say, as with every previous discussion on the subject of favourite books of one sort or another, the debate swiftly dissolved into endless one-upmanship, but out of this, I’m pleased to say, came some truly excellent suggestions.
As ever, we’d love to hear your favourites, so please leave your comments at the bottom of the page or on Twitter.
Dom, pipped to the post for The Wind in the Willows, chose Laurie Lee’s Cider with Rosie, saying that, “Some of the scenes from that book were so vivid, they’ve become practically my own memories. It’s the book equivalent of Inception!”
Camilla’s first suggestion is The Enchanted Wood, by Enid Blyton – and she has exactly the measure of a lot of Blyton’s books:
“Ginger beer, doorstep sandwiches and smugglers coves – in fact the very holiday I am just embarking on, though of course it never seemed to rain and I bet they didn’t spend hours sitting in a traffic jam on the A30.”
My choices are, for much the same reason as Camilla, Enid Blyton’s Famous Five books, as well as A Spoonful of Jam by Michelle Magorian and Raspberries on the Yangtze by Karen Wallace, both of which have sort-of magical qualities about them. And finally, I believe I would be remiss not to mention the summer strips of Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes cartoons (pictured above), which, like all of our choices, cannot capture everything that’s wonderful about Summer, but certainly go a long way towards trying.
Now – over to you!
We’ve had some Twitter recommendations with the hashtag #summerreads:
@rogue_eight suggested The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, by Alan Garner
Really, I think, because I was in Australia on publication date, we haven’t taken time this month to celebrate the distillations of children’s book goodness that are our May publications.
And May was a big month for us: for the first time, we were publishing more than one print “thing”.
Just to remind those of you who are interested in a kind of “previously on Nosy Crow” kind of way:
In January, we published Small Blue Thing, so the list launched with a single romantic fantasy novel.
Dinosaur Dig was inspired by Penny’s pre-school grandson Zachary’s love of all things mechanical. It’s a counting book with (very benign) dinosaurs, mechanical earth-moving equipment, a bit of suspense and a swimming pool finale. It caters quite shamelessly for the obsessions of many, many small boys. One of the things we thought that they would respond to is the carefully-realised detail of the dinosaurs and the diggers: you can see every claw and every piston. This was a book that came in to Nosy Crow from Penny’s agent just weeks after we’d started up. It was a book that we’d made an offer for within an hour of opening the envelope with Penny’s beautifully detailed sketches in it. Here’s a little flavour of what the book looks like inside:
And, to give you a sense of how Penny works, here’s a movie of Penny (re)drawing the cover artwork on an iPad:
She’s written about the process of creating the book for a boy audience in a guest post for the Book Trust blog.
We’re in the run-up to Easter (and Passover’s begun – any good childeren’s versions of the Haggadah, people?), so it seemed interesting to ask people for their Easter and, more generally, spring book recommendations.
EASTER-SPECIFICTITLES
It seems that the most impressive – to me – children’s book telling the story of Easter, Jan Pienkowski’s Easter, is out of print. It combines King James Bible words with Jan’s trademark silhouettes against a marbled background.
@dredgewood suggested The Story of Easter by Christopher Doyle.
Tom, who’s interning here, and whose photography skills I’ve already roundly mocked, suggested that the great Easter children’s book is The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by CS Lewis. I looked puzzled. “But it’s about a world where it’s always winter and never Christmas,” I said. He reminded me of the Christian allegory of Aslan’s self-sacrifice for Edmund’s betrayal. Ahem. He is right, of course… though, as ever, I tend to see children’s books through the lens through which a child might look at it, and I don’t think that many 10 year olds will clock that allegory.
SPRINGTITLESMOREGENERALLY
Widening the search beyond Easter-specific titles, I asked Twitter followers about spring and chick ‘n’ bunny books.
There were a few generally spring-like suggestions.
@sarah_hilary proposed The Secret Garden, which is, after all, about a physical and metaphorical, transition from winter to early summer.
And, if we’re going general – and as maybe I’m thinking about it because of the current almost-full moon – what about The Very Hungry Caterpillar?
BOOKSWITHCHICKS, EGGSETC
I had the following suggestions that were poultry-based:
@prestonrutt suggested Ed Vere’s Chick.
@Discover_Story suggested The Odd Egg by Emily Gravett.
@AliB68 reminded me of The Spring Song in Tales from Moominvalley by Tove Jansson.
And I’d add a personal favourite, Ruby Flew Too by Jonathen Emmett and Rebecca Harry – read it as a parent and blub.
BOOKSWITHBUNNIES
There were some fine bunny-based suggestions too:
Camilla suggested Guess How Much I Love You (the office copy of which she’s just taken home to read aloud).
@prestonrutt suggested Emily Gravett’s The Rabbit Problem.
@dredgewood suggested The Country Bunny & The Gold Shoes by Du Bose Heyward.
Not a rabbit, but a hamster (so here because displaying impeccable rodent credentials and also because it has Easter in the title), was remembered fondly by @amandapollard, whose Haffertee’s First Easter by Janet and John Perkins was a Sunday School gift, “and undoubtedly the highlight of 8 years endured”.
@sarah_hilary suggested The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Wiliams (again, I think of this, in my literal-minded way as a Christmas book more than an Easter book) and it got two other votes too, so it made the list, on condition that no other edition than the William Nicholson illustrated edition is given house room, and I do love it.
Kate Burns suggested You’re a Hero, Daley B by Jon Blake, which was one of the first books that Axel Scheffler illustrated.
My own list would include:
Axel Scheffler’sPip and Posy and The Super Scooter (of course!), which not only features a very fine rabbit (Pip) but also feels very spring-like. As Julia Eccleshare says of this book in her round-up of new children’s books for this Easter in The Guardian, “Scheffler’s illustrations are full of comfort and gentle humour”.
Little Rabbit Foo Foo by Michael Rosen and Arthur Robins (just typing it makes me smile).
Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter (and @publishingmum mentioned Peter Rabbit too)
ACTIVITYBOOKS
There’s lots of spring/Easter activity stuff out there.
The very fine website, Parents in Touch, has done a post on spring and Easter activity books here
Also on the activity books theme, when I asked on Twitter for Easter book recommendations, Usborne amusingly simply sent me a link to their homepage and therefore all of their books. However, it is true that they have an awful lot of Easter titles here. When pressed, their tweeter selected First Activities: Easter Fun as their favourite Usborne Easter book.
A RELUCTANTAFTERTHOUGHT
And finally, I am, with a stone in my stomach, forced, too, to acknowledge that several people pointed out that the weekend following the Easter weekend is the Royal Wedding weekend (maybe this is just sour grapes: I will be flying to Australia). The Perfectly Pretty Royal Wedding Book was suggested by Scholastic, which I’d have ignored (sorry, Alyx), except that @librarymice said she was giving it to her daughter as part of her Easter book bundle. So here it is, included with a bit of a sigh.
So what’s missing from this list? Do let us know by sending us a comment.
We’ve got very cheering videos of a pair of two year-olds reading each of the books in the “extras” tab for each book.
These books have simple rhyming texts and really sturdy mechanisms and are really great for children from 18 months to 3.
We’ve got some to send to reviewers and bloggers. So, if toddler books float your boat, let us know: contact us on hello@nosycrow.com with the subject line, Reviewing Bizzy Bear.
And if you are in East London today (4 March), you could come to our Bizzy Bear event at 11.30am for 45 minutes of songs, stories and colouring at the Discover Centre’sBig Write festival, where we’re doing other events, too:
Yesterday, Kate met up with Neal Hoskins (pictured) of Winged Chariot in the Crow’s Nest to talk about the opportunities for collaboration amongst apps publishers, and, specifically, children’s apps publishers. For all of us involved in apps publishing, the challenge is how people – parents in our case – find good apps among the ever-growing sea of apps on the store.
They also talked about the Bologna Tools of Change Conference 2011, which Neal is heavily involved in, and at which Kate will be a keynote speaker.
Then Kate and Imogen left for the Bounce Marketing sales conference for April to August titles in Islington, wrapping fizzy wine in the back of the car to give to the Bounce reps so they could drink to Nosy Crow’s first book (Small Blue Thing) being published on 13 January 2011. Kate presented to an enthusiastic audience of 18, and it was great to see how many of the reps had already read many of the titles: Bizzy Bear and Pip and Posy were being enthusiastically read by one sales manager’s two year-old. The six year-old “reluctant artist” son of one of the reps had loved completing his first Mega Mash-up book. And one of the reps told everyone how much she’d LOVEDOlivia’s First Term.
After a meeting at the Publisher’s Association about World Book Day 2012 (which’ll be the subject of another post), Kate met up with Imogen and Kirsty at Bounce’s Christmas Party, and Kirsty and Kate had to be asked to leave as the pub was closing. A fine time was had by all.
Here’s Camilla with top freelance designer, Sarah Goodwin, and very fine Benji Davies’ artwork for _Bizzy Bear: Fun on the Farm that the massively efficient Benji has delivered several weeks early. Bizzy is shaping up to be a tremendously appealing character, and these are really simple, sturdy board-books with big, bold novelty mechanisms.
It’s all good.
The sharp-eyed among you will also spot lavender and honey cupcakes, because it’s lavender time in London and so why not?
We had a really good meeting with Benji Davies, a very talented
illustrator and animator, about our series of Bizzy Bear toddler
books. It was another step towards making Nosy Crow public. We
really hope he’ll agree to take the books on.
