I work as a nanny/babysitter and I use my iphone as bribery. Its bad, I know…but so damn handy!
“If you put your shoes and socks on, then you have play for 5 minutes on my iphone”
“go brush your teeth, and once you have done that you can have 5 minutes on my iphone”
“if you finish your homework you can play on the iphone for 5 minutes before we practise your reading”
(its always 5 minutes, thats the rule)
I love seeing how much fun they have with it, and their amazing abilities to understand a new game amazingly fast. And I am so impressed with the way they share, I let one boy know its his brother’s turn and they politly hand the iphone over, or ask if they can quickly finish the roung/game/song.
The children I look after are always so excited about my iphone, and I always make sure I have some games on there to suit the different age groups of the kids I look after. The older kids (9-12) love ‘Tap Defense’, the 8 year olds in my life appear to love ‘Tap Tap’, with the 6-7 year olds loving ‘Fallingballs’ and drawing aps. They always get so excited when they beat my top score!
One little boy I look after is 4, and is just gorgeous. I have the Bubbles ap on my iphone for him. He loves it, makes a whole bunch of bubbles, pops them all and comes to tell me he won! But his favourite game is the ‘Wobble Game’. When he told me he had found the wobble game I was driving so I said “oh wow, have fun! We will be back soon and I can watch you play”. I pulled up at the top of the driveway and he handed the phone over for me to see the game.
He had held his finger down on one of the aps long enough that it had gone into the ap rearrangment mode, and all the apps were indeed wobbleing. He had spread all my apps over 5 pages and mixed up all my organised apps. He hadn’t done any damage, and I needed to do a bit of a reshuffle anyway, so no harm done. But I couldn’t stop laughing, he had had so much fun on the “wobble game” and couldn’t wait to play it again that I didn’t have the heart to tell him it wasn’t actually a game!
Now to find a way to clean the little sticky fingerprints and smears off the screen.