iPhone Apps are a great tool to encourage learning through play and with careful selection by parents they could be invaluable in the development of literacy. The multilingual aspect of the applications is ideal for bilingual children. The majority of the applications are in English, but there is a good choice of apps in other languages too.  iTunes has a great range of eBooks and games for toddlers, preschoolers and school age children. I like the selection of stories by PicPocket Books who bring classic tales to your iPhone to entertain your kids on the go. The original illustrations have been adapted to screen mode and are perfectly combined with audio artists reading the words. I like the highlight feature that draws attention to the word as it is narrated, which helps children relating the sound to the visual spelling.  On top of that some of their titles are also available in Spanish.  Even very young ones will easily flip the pages by sliding them across the screen with a slight touch. My son really likes the Big Stuff series; so far we have downloaded Big Sea Creatures and Dinosaurs by Robert Gould & Eugene Epstein. They are great for factual information and brief enough to read over and over again. English is my son’s second language so I try to feed him a lot of fun and educational apps to help his spelling and reading levels. He enjoys the interaction with a lot of the applications I have selected for him and he is making incredible headway with both spelling and math games. His favourite spelling app is Spelling Fun, a simple spelling game where the goal is to make a word with given letter tiles just by arranging them in horizontal order on the screen. There are 200 difficulty levels and over 750 words in the game. Every time you make a word you get a score, the further you move along in the game the more difficult it gets.  I have written before about KidMathFun and Learn Time, which continue to be in his favourites. He likes to test his knoweledge against time to improve his score records whilst improving his math’s skills in an English environment. I am so pleased with the progress that for his birthday we allowed him to have his very own iPod Touch, which has proved to be a great learning tool as well as fun.