Kindle fire kids
If you do want to tailor your kid's FreeTime experience on the Kindle Kids Edition, you might run into a few problems. My parents definitely didn’t feel the need to read every Harry Potter book along with me. Monitoring your child’s content might be less of an issue when they get to age 7. I feel fine letting my child watch videos on our Fire tablet for a half-hour without watching over her shoulder. With FreeTime Unlimited, you pay for peace of mind. It limits her exposure to terrible ads for squishy garbage balls on YouTube Kids, and I like the quality of Amazon’s kid shows, like Pete the Cat and Tumble Leaf. At her age, I’ve found FreeTime Unlimited to be a valuable service. After two weeks of reading for a half-hour or more every night, the battery is still at 54 percent.Īt almost 5, my kid is younger than the recommended age for the Kindle Kids, which is 7. As always, battery life is excellent, too. And at 8 GB, it actually has twice as much storage than the standard Kindle-it can hold almost a thousand books.
KINDLE FIRE KIDS BLUETOOTH
It has Bluetooth for Audible books, which are forthcoming (as of publication, Amazon has not clarified the release date). In our case, that category was mainly books about princesses. FreeTime Unlimited suggests age-appropriate characters, themes, popular books, books in Spanish, and books you might like. On a side-by-side comparison, Amazon’s FreeTime Unlimited platform does not look all that different from the home page on any Kindle-familiar, if still a little wonky and hard to navigate. If your child drops it in the toilet just once, you recoup that extra $20, and it will still be cheaper than buying your child the Paperwhite-an important note, since the Kindle Kids Edition isn’t waterproof. It comes with a year’s subscription to FreeTime Unlimited ($3 a month after that), as well as a two-year unlimited warranty. But if it gets her interested in reading longer books, I’ll take it. It's not quite what I thought teaching my kid to read would look like-she isn't lying on her bedroom floor, flipping through my vintage 1970s editions of The Chronicles of Narnia. Now she carries it around with her, much like I do, and I’ve white-listed a few other selections into her FreeTime profile. When I opened it, she willingly set down the picture books, scrolled through the selections, and listened to me read aloud 10 chapters of Ariel’s Birthday Surprise before bed. They know exactly what it is, and are excited to read, too. After all, my kids see me reading on my Kindle much more than they see me toting giant hardcovers around the house. So it was less surprising than it might have been to find that the Kindle Kids Edition helped her get into reading longer books. Even our local library has tablets available for children in the lobby. We order Halloween costumes on my laptop. She watches Wishenpoof! on a Fire tablet for kids at the doctor’s office and asks me to look up what sloths eat on my phone. My almost 5-year-old now uses a Portal to call her grandparents. But screens are so ubiquitous that it’s sometimes hard for me to grasp how thoroughly they’ve infiltrated my kids’ lives. Like most parents, I try to limit my kid’s screen time.