Five Little Monkeys Go Shopping – A Children’s Interactive Digital Book

By Jamie Wiersma

Our family recently downloaded Oceanhouse Media’s omBook “Five Little Monkeys Go Shopping” by Eileen Christelow on our iPad2 (available for most devices). Mama takes her five little monkeys shopping the day before school. While they are in the store the monkeys keep wandering off. Will Mama ever have all of her monkeys together again?  If you are familiar with the Five Little Monkeys series, you already know that these are great books. But, the digital version is even more enjoyable for little kids because it is very interactive through fun monkey noises and words that zoom up and are spoken when pictures are touched.

There are three ways that this omBook can be read – Read to Me (listen to the narrated story with words highlighted as they are read), Read it Myself (read the book in its traditional form), and Auto Play (plays like a movie, automatically reading and turning pages.) The “Read to Me” version is great for my 5-year old.  He is able to follow along as the words are highlighted while the story is being read.

Things That Make this Digital Book Great:

• It incorporates early math by adding and subtracting the monkeys when they run off and then come back to Mama.
• The audio is great – the monkey noises and other surrounding sounds are very cute and add a lot to the story.
• The book encourages early reading through picture/word association. The words zoom up and are spoken when pictures are touched. Early readers can also follow along with the highlighted words while the book is being read.
• The pictures are bright and colorful.

 A Few Cons:

• It is not so great for my almost two-year old who likes to swipe at the iPad. His little fingers have figured out how to interrupt the story which then requires you to answer a prompt asking you if you want to continue or not. Then it starts that same page again. It’s probably an iPad thing, but it does get annoying. Especially on Auto Play it would be nice if the pages stayed locked.
• I think it could be even better if there was more touch interaction on the math side of things.

A Mom’s Perspective 

Overall, both my almost 2-year old and my 5-year old really enjoy “Five Little Monkeys Go Shopping.” The book is probably best suited for ages 3 – 6. I would definitely recommend the book to any parent that is looking for cute books to download for your child that also encourage additional learning skills in math and reading. The app is available at iTunes for $2.99. If you enjoy this book, Oceanhouse Media has a ton of other children’s digital books available such as Dr. Seuss, The Berenstain Bears, more Five Little Monkey books as well as many others.

* I was given a code to download “Five Little Monkeys Go Shopping” for my honest opinion. All opinions are my own.