Thursday, March 27, 2014

FARFARIA Book App Review & Giveaway!


Are you looking for ways to engage your students in storytime? Do you use children's book apps for storytime?? Do you pay $$money$$ for every book you download? If you answered yes to any of these, then you definitely need to check out "Farfaria." 

Farfaria recently contacted me and asked me if I would be interested in doing a review of their app in exchange for a free subscription. Duh, a free subscription! Well, yeah!!!! We all know how much teachers love FREE stuff! Not to mention, it was perfect because I recently began doing daily storytime in my classroom using digital books on the ipad and was getting frustrated that everyone kept teasing us with a few free book downloads and then wanted money!!! Heck, we're teachers......we can't afford to pay for that! Just let our kids read!!! Right?!

I've been using Farfaria now in my classroom for daily storytime and I cannot tell a fib.....I LOVE it! I cannot think of one complaint. Let me just cut to the grind!

There are 11 genres you can choose from!

Here's a peak at "Genius Jungle"......one of the favorites in my classroom!
However, their most favorite and mine too....has been "Sing Along City."
I just love all the sing along books in this genre! I'll never have to search for songs again! They're all right here!

Once you choose your book, there are 3 options to choose from......Auto play which plays the audio book page by page automatically, read to me which lets children turn the pages, or read myself. You can read it now, or tap the blue button at the top of page and save to your favorites. As you can see, the Sharks book above is labeled in the lower right corner as a level 4 reader! I love that all the books are labeled by reading level.
I also love that you can search books by most popular, A-Z order, newest, or by reading level using the light blue tabs you see under the books. Again......super user-friendly!!!

Whats even more awesome is...........

*Farfaria has over 600 books in their library, with 5 new stories being added each week.
*It is very user-friendly
*There are 4 reading levels to choose from
*You can save books to Your Favorites for off-line reading
*You can pay nothing and still download & read one story a day for FREE

I've tried Reading Rainbow, MeeGenius, NOOK kids, and couple other book apps, but Farfaria is my new favorite and most likely the only book app program I will use again.....unless I need a book they don't offer! 

When compared to these other book apps; I like Reading Rainbow, but they want $10 a month to access their books,  MeeGenius charges $5 a month or $2.99 a book, and NOOK is not only complicated as heck to navigate; taking up valuable time....they also charge per book! I love that with Farfaria, I don't have to do a book search beforehand or before writing my lesson plans and load books onto my bookshelf! When it's storytime I simply open my ipad and the Farfaria app on my Smartboard, choose a student to come up and choose a book, and we are enjoying a good book within a couple seconds. 

I use the apple "Dongle" to display my ipad onto my Smartboard. I've also noticed a huge increase in student engagement during storytime since we began utilizing books on the ipad. 

Now you may be wondering.....how much is a subscription to Farfaria! Farfaria only charges $3.99 a month for unlimited access to their entire library and it is so well worth it!!! But lucky for you, they are generously GIVING AWAY a 3-MONTH FREE SUBSCRIPTION with unlimited access to TWO of you! Just enter the rafflecopter below!





You will love this app! Good Luck!!



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