10 Free And Fun Educational Apps To Make Your Kids’ Screen Time Count
Educational, fun and free apps to support your kid’s literacy and numeracy learning
By Nur and Gwyneth Goh -
Once upon a time, you vowed never to give your future kids screen time. And then kids happened and your vow seemed almost impossible to honour. Screentime for children has been — and will always be — a taboo topic, since parents’ opinions vary widely.
The official recommendation from Singapore’s Health Promotion Board is that screen exposure (excluding live video chats) for infants under 18 months old is discouraged. For toddlers beyond 18 months old to 3 years old, screen use is recommended to be no longer than one hour a day. Even so, content should be educational and age relevant.
So in this day and age where devices are plenty, it might be worth relooking at how you can make your kids’ time spent on their devices count! These educational and fun apps will kickstart your kids’ literacy and numeracy development while they are on devices, giving you time to enjoy a quiet cuppa (or two) — and the best part is that the kids won’t even know they’re learning. Best of all? They're free.
Remember how The Khan Academy was so helpful for you back in school? Now, there is Khan Academy Kids to impress your very own 2- to 7-year-olds! It provides full free access to all of its educational content that includes their very own in-house curated library of digital books.
The library hosts an impressive range of non-fiction themes such as National Geographic Explorer, Backyard Wildlife and Playful Pets. Short fiction titles for early readers are also available. Just by glancing at the titles, you can be assured that the stories have been thoughtfully written to support kids’ social and emotional development needs, with a focus on identifying feelings and encouraging empathy. Kids have the option to read independently or have the narrator read for them. Its navigation features for kids to explore the app on their own are attractive yet simple too!
Available on Google Play, App Store and Amazon.
You can agree or disagree with the name of this app. However, an exciting feature of this app is the range of challenges that your independent readers can carry out to help out their monster avatar. In their adventurous quest to fight the book-eating goblin, your young readers can get to choose the fiction or non-fiction digital books available at the village’s library. This could be the very reason your kids get hooked on independent reading!
Having the autonomy over what to read can help your kids feel empowered and encourage them to pick up the habit of reading. A double win situation for you and your cute monster, we say.
Available on Google Play and App Store.
This is another free app worth exploring for kids from 4 to 12 years old. Trying to get your pre-school kids to have phonemic awareness? How about introducing them to alliteration through the Alphabats Alliteration game? Your kids will also never get bored picking up important skills that are critical to cognitive development such as identifying shape patterns, and observing similarities and differences. With over 80 games for Math, your kids will fall in love with Math in no time through fun games such as ‘Bow and Angle’ and ‘Feed me Fractions’.
Available as a standalone website here, and on Google Play and App Store.
Best for animal-loving kids aged 3-7, this app helps support your kids in recognising numbers up to 100. Kids will be able to easily explore the app to play 5 different activities that focus on skills such as recognising number orders, understanding patterns, and comparing lengths. The interactive and kids-friendly navigation features also offer kids the autonomy to make choices along the way. Your kids will definitely be engaged while having fun learning Math.
Available on Amazon, Google Play and App Store.
Fish School is another free app that is suitable for kids aged 2 to 5. There are a total of 8 activities that your younger kids can play to strengthen their foundation in recognising letters, numbers, shapes and colours — all necessary skills for that age range.
Available on App Store, Google Play and Amazon.
Also under Khan Academy Kids, this app is suitable for kids 4 to 7 years old. Its playful and interactive interface makes it more motivating for kids to learn spelling of common everyday objects. Kids can collect digital stickers that come in the form of pictures of the words that they have managed to spell correctly. There are four developmental stages: letters, phonics, spelling I and spelling II, and they offer kids the chance to navigate among the levels freely.
Available on the App Store only.
Most suitable for kids aged 5 to 9, this app allows your kid to master their recognition of more than 300 sight words. There are a total of 8 games that your kid can play, including ‘Memory Match’ and ‘Bubble Pop’! These games give your kid ample practice in recognising the words that often appear in the things they see or read around them.
Available on the App Store only.
A great tool for pre-readers and early writers, this bright and engaging app invites your child to acquaint themselves with the Alphabet by tracing each letter. On top of familiarising them with letter shapes, gameplay also teaches them phonic sounds and strengthens alphabet learning through fun matching exercises.
Available on App Store, Google Play, Amazon and Microsoft (for PC).
Set your kid up for early reading success with this fun monstrous sight-reader. This app’s exciting animations will help reinforce your child’s learning of common sight words, with interactive puzzles bringing words to life, sentence puzzles encouraging word recognition, and adorable monster characters helping to demonstrate meaning and context.
Available on Google Play, App Store and Amazon.
An award winning learning app boasting more than 1,200 interactive games and activities, Thinkrolls is the perfect amalgamation of fun and learning. Packing tonnes of subliminal learning into play, the app will cultivate your child’s reasoning and logic skills, enhance their creativity and curiosity levels, instil a passion for math and science, as well as plant the seeds of early coding logic. New games are added to the growing collection of fun every month so learning will never get boring.
Available on the App Store only.
For Android users, Avokiddo offers a similar logic puzzler paid app for kids aged 3-9 called “Thinkrolls 2: Puzzles for Kids”, found here on Google Play.