Apps To Use With Grandchildren of Any Age

The bond between grandparent and grandchild is special—free from the responsibilities of parenthood, you can focus on the sheer joy of being together and supporting each other. Technology provides a unique opportunity to meet grandchildren where they are, to keep in touch and to better understand their lives. Here’s a guide to all the apps you may want to try:

Apps To Help Stay In Touch

The whole family benefits when grandparents get online and can help to maintain relationships between grandchildren and grandparents.

Interacting online can boost the quantity and quality of your relationships with family members living far away. Apps like FaceTime and Skype enable even babies and toddlers to actually recognize and have genuine relationships with family that lives across the country or even across the world. A 2-year-old probably wouldn’t understand the concept of a grandparent who lives far away, whom he sees a few times a year. But a grandparent he chats with “face to face” once a week? It’s a totally different story.

If you need a way to keep up to date on the most adorable pictures of your grandkids, especially precious baby pictures, consider asking the parents to set up the family on Tinybeans, where they can share photos of the kids privately with the people they care about.

Apps To Learn Together

As grandchildren learn and grow, connecting via educational apps and games can be a rewarding way to build bonds and grow together. Not to mention that learning new things tends to have more redeeming value than playing a violent video game.

You can play alongside your little ones to help them develop a wide range of skills. In My Very Hungry Caterpillar, kids 5 and under get the chance to play with the colorful character in the iconic picture book. This game encourages them to appreciate nature and navigate individualized play.

If you like to read to your grandkids, Sight Words lets you sit alongside them as they learn to recognize basic words in an engaging interface. Meanwhile, Kodable is great for science- and math-inclined youngsters ages 6 and up, as it helps them explore the basics of coding in an approachable way. You can visit the curriculum section to better help the kids learn.

For older grandkids, consider a role reversal: Have them teach you something you’ve been wanting to learn on your phone. Artistically minded kids will be eager to share the ins and outs of different Instagram filters and hashtags. Or maybe your grandchild can teach you how to use Etsy to search for creative, handmade birthday and holiday gifts.

Pinterest is your online ticket to creating a vision board. On this application, you can save and share certain images and articles, putting them into categories. Planning your next vacation? Try using Pinterest to find destinations to go to and activities to participate in.

If you have knowledge-hungry teenage grandkids, you can both learn something new at the same time. See if the teens in your life might be up for taking a class together around a shared interest. Massive open online courses, or MOOCs, offer university-caliber classes (many of them free!) in a wide variety of subjects. Signing up for a course together means you can learn something new, discuss long-distance and always have something to talk about.

Services like edX and Coursera provide course options ranging from music and art to foreign languages and economics.

Apps for Fun

One great thing about game apps on your cellphone is that they’re passive—are you going to have a revolutionary conversation with your grandkid while you try to earn points off each other in some clicky online game? No, probably not. But will you have an opportunity to interact in a casual setting, perhaps as often as every day? Most likely.

Words With Friends is a Scrabble-type game in which players compete by taking turns arranging words horizontally and vertically on a board. An extra perk? There’s a chat section so you can share quick updates or check in (or, ahem, trash talk each other) to make the interaction less transactional and more rewarding.

If you like testing each other’s knowledge, consider a modern version of trivia with Trivia Crack, when game night isn’t possible in real life.