With a four and six year-old, we’ve moved on from teaching basic shapes and colours to our kids. Now it’s more about teaching them NOT to leave square Lego bricks (of any colour) on the floor where we’ll tread on them…

However, if your children are younger and just getting to grips with recognising shapes and colours, you may want to give Patchimals a try. It’s a new iPad app from developer Netereo that we’ve taken a shine to.

It’s a neatly-designed app split into 12 levels, the first four of which are included in the initial free download. Each involves either touching or catching coloured shapes as they appear on the screen – ‘catching’ means they’re moving around to make it a bit more challenging.

So, level one simply gets children to touch the shapes as they appear, but later ones rely on touching the right shape, colour and/or texture – the latter referring to the level when stripes and other patterns start appearing.

One of the Patchimal characters gives spoken feedback as your child goes, either saying what they’ve touched, or saying encouraging phrases (‘Bravo!’, ‘Excellent!’, ‘Keep it up!’ and so on). We like the look of the Patchimals, by the way: the neat illustration style is very charming.

“Each level is designed to allow children to advance based on their skills. They will also exercise their fine motor functions and learn the basic use of gestures on mobile devices,” claims the App Store listing. “They will be able to assimilate the concept of action and reaction, and learn different languages with the words and sentences at each level.”

Patchimals is a free download for iPad from Apple’s App Store, with a single in-app purchase of £1.49 to unlock levels 5-12 once your child is ready to move on from the first four. Also worth noting: you can choose English or Spanish language.

Read about more education apps for kids on Apps Playground, and check out our 100 Best iPad Apps of 2013 e-book – £1.99 from Apple’s iBooks Store