What a year. Our mission to scour the App Store for the best iPhone and iPad apps for kids turned up hundreds of marvellous examples: creative tools, educational apps, playful games and engrossing stories.

Sorting through them to figure out our favourites from 2013 has been a tough task. When we started Apps Playground, we decided to only write about apps we thought were good: there are just too many to waste time on the average ones.

That means that a lot of excellent apps have missed out on our end-of-year roundup. And because of another decision we made early on – to never ask app developers for money to jump the queue and get written about – we’re sure we’ve also missed out on some good ones through sheer, overwhelming weight of numbers when it comes to writing.

So, this is a very personal selection of our best of 2013: the apps that have stayed in our mind, and even more importantly, proved a hit with our own two children. We hope it proves useful for parents whether you’re experienced iOS owners, or are looking to stock a brand new iPad for your kids this Christmas.

We’ve split our best-of into five sections – creative, playful, educational, stories and games – rather than last year’s 100-to-1 countdown format. Whichever one you start with, you can use the links at the bottom of each piece to visit the other categories.

Enjoy, and have a great Christmas! Just over 265,000 people have visited Apps Playground in 2013, and we’re really excited about pushing on in 2014 - starting with our first e-book, which we hope to have approved to go on sale in Apple’s iBooks store in early January.

APPS PLAYGROUND’S 100 BEST APPS FOR KIDS OF 2013
• 20 best creative iPhone and iPad apps for kids of 2013
• 20 best playful iPhone and iPad apps for kids of 2013
• 20 best educational iPhone and iPad apps for kids of 2013
• 20 best story iPhone and iPad apps for kids of 2013
• 20 best iPhone and iPad games for kids of 2013