Analogies

Sheep is to lamb, as rabbit is to … bunny! As children grow, analogies become an integral part of their studies: in English, in math and science, and later, on college-admittance tests. Fortunately, there's an app for that. Analogies provides a great way to help build your child's confidence with analogies at an early age, using a bingo-like game format to keep them engaged as they tackle synonyms, antonyms, descriptive words, part-to-whole analogies and more.

The full version, reviewed here, offers five different levels of difficulty, three modes of play (practice, single-player and multi-player) as well as 375 multiple-choice questions and analogies. If you're not ready to splurge, a half-price lite version is available with two modes of play (practice and single-player) and 125 questions. As children answer questions correctly, they build up a collection of virtual chips to fill out a bingo-like card.

The game aspect makes this app fairly appealing to kids, but the lack of interesting graphics, sophisticated interactivity and a variety of games might mean little ones lose interest more quickly than with other apps. Still, Analogies delivers a solid way to better grasp figurative language and word relationships in an amusing game.