These are the best apps for kids to stay busy, entertained, and learn new things
It’s a fact of life that many children now use smartphones and tablets every day. While this may have been frowned upon a few years ago, many people increasingly acknowledge that there are many benefits. The Google Play Store is awash with apps for kids of all ages, from enjoyable games to learning and education. In fact, kids don’t even realize they’re learning as they’re having so much fun with many educational apps and games.
What are the best children apps for android?
If you’re looking for some of the best free apps for kids on android, it can be tricky to find family-friendly apps that kids will love to use in their downtime. Let’s check out the following best kids apps that will keep your children entertained, help them with education, and have fun. These apps cover a range of ages, so there should be something for all kids to enjoy and make good use of. They cover various topics such as games, videos, storybooks, arts and crafts, and music, and some feature parental controls so you can be sure your kids are safeguarded.
Kids Place
Price: Free with ads/ Offers IAP
While this is not an app for kids themself, it’s where every parent should begin. Kids Place an effective parental control app and a must-have application for every parent. This custom app launcher is a little different from the other apps in our list, as it acts as a hub for kid’s apps that you approve of in a sandbox environment. This means it’s a safe place for your kids to enjoy apps on their Android smartphones and tablets while giving you peace of mind at the same time. Parents can set time limits for use, block in-app purchases, block calls and SMS, monitor activity, limit access to other apps, and disable wireless signals, and more. There’s no way your kids can bypass your settings as you establish a PIN when setting up the app.
This is all free, but a premium version is also available with additional features that include creating custom user profiles for different children, automatic restart of the app when the device is powered up, and no option to remove the app.
Kids Doodle
Price: Free with ads
Kids Doodle is one of the best drawing apps aimed at kids aged 6 to 12, and it’s entirely free to use, as there are no pesky IAPs. I haven’t been able to put it down…ahem…I mean, my kids haven’t been able to put it down! There are 24 different brushes with effects such as neon, rainbow, fireworks, and glow to make their masterpieces come to life, and it’s a great way for kids to develop their creative imagination. An elegant touch is that your kids can also doodle on photographs to create some real family fun. Once a doodle is complete, it can be saved to the gallery or watched back as a video clip. Overall, this is excellent color and draw game for children.
Download Kids Doodle – Color & Draw
Khan Academy Kids
Price: Free/ Offer IAP
Khan Academy is known for providing a great experience for students with their digital learning app. The kid’s specific version of the app is aimed at young children in kindergarten and up-to-fourth grade or in primary school. The app is entirely free, with no in-app purchases or ads. It also keeps up the reputation with the adult version of the learning app. The app offers free educational games & books for reading, learning a language, practicing writing, getting familiar with math, and developing social and problem-solving skills. This is an excellent app that makes learning fun enjoyable, featuring cute, colorful animals to deliver lessons. Kids can also participate in mini-games to stay engaged.
Fairy Tales
Price: Free/ Offers IAP
There are plenty of storybook apps for toddlers, but Fairy Tales is definitely one of the best. It’s for ages 8 and under, so it covers toddlers and pre-schoolers too, and it has all of the well-known fairy tales, including classics such as Cinderella, The Three Little Pigs, Beauty, and the Beast, The Ugly Duckling, Goldilocks, and the Three Bears and many more.
The app also features interactive mini learning games with jigsaw puzzles, hidden objects, and card matching. Further features include animated characters, offline reading, Read to Me and Read it Myself modes, and protection against unintentional purchases.
Nick Jr.
Price: Free
Nick Jr. is an excellent option for preschoolers and toddlers if you want to keep the kids amused. It offers an extensive amount of content that includes original entertainment and educational videos, TV show episodes, games, and regular updates, and there’s plenty to access for free. Nevertheless, if you have a subscription to the Nick Jr. channel, you’ll get access to even more video content.
Intellijoy kids apps
Price: Free/ Offer IAP
Over the years, Intellijoy brings quite a few popular and useful kids apps to the android platform. It a good collection of apps for reading, counting, shapes, music, animals, puzzles, preschool, and a lot more. Although some of the apps cost a few bucks, they are still a good source for kids’ educational content on smartphones or tablet devices.
Fun Piano for Kids
Price: Free
This piano app is a super fun app for kids that offers an enjoyable way to learn music. It has an appealing and gorgeous colorful interface with cute animals that make playing more exciting. Before you know it, they’ll be picking up the basics and maybe even surprise you with their musical talent! Parents can choose a song and lock it so the kids can focus more easily on simply playing music. Further features are a 2-player mode so parents can play along too, the ability to translate songs from overseas, and a record and playback facility.
ABC Kids
Price: Free with ads/ Offers IAP
If you want to help your kids with the alphabet, this is a great place to start, and it’s good for little toddlers right through to pre-schoolers. This is a decent free app for little ones, and best of all, there is no annoying ads block. Children can quickly learn to trace letters, recognize their shapes, and learn phonics, and they’re rewarded with stickers as games are completed. It includes both uppercase and lowercase letters, and features include a Teacher Mode for parents with reports cards and more.
YouTube Kids
*Editor’s choice* Price: Free with ads
This free Google app provides a safe environment for your kids to access and watch videos. Whether they prefer movies, TV shows, or music, there’s an abundance of suitable content accessible in this app. Parental controls are available so you can provide a safe online experience, and up to eight kids can have their own profiles where you set what they can each watch, making the material age-appropriate. You can also block specific content, or as your kids get older, you have the option to access new content.
Keep in mind that it’s always possible that some inappropriate content might slip through their family-friendly net. Still, considering the amount of YouTube videos available, the app seems to be doing a pretty good job of keeping a tight rein on things. If this does happen, though, Google urges parents to report what they find and quickly review it.
Toca Kitchen 2
Price: Free with ads
Toca Boca has numerous educational and pretend-play apps, but unlike most others, this one is free. If you’d like your child to learn all about food and become more interested in cooking, the Toca Kitchen is a great place to start. They can try out different food combinations, invent tasty recipes (or not-so-tasty ones), select from a variety of kitchen tools, and watch their guests’ reactions when they try the dishes. The best bit is that it doesn’t matter how messy the virtual kitchen gets, so they can really be as creative as they like.
How To Make Paper Airplane
Price: Free with ads/ Offers IAP
How to make Paper Airplanes is an android app that every kid will love. The app illustrates how to make paper planes in a 3d animation view which allows kids to learn quickly how to makes airplanes by folding papers. The instructions are clear and simple. Like origami, making paper airplanes will help kids with brain training to develop their spatial thinking and fine motor skills, logical reasoning, and attention span. So, there are actual benefits of keeping your kids busy with such an app.
Alphabet & Numbers
Price: Free with ads/ Offers IAP
Alphabet & Numbers app will help your child to practice Handwriting with finger tracing flashcards. 123s ABCs Handwriting Fun app allows tracing the letter & number then play it. Shake and erase to start from the beginning. In short, it’s a great kid app to train good handwriting.
Download 123s ABCs Handwriting Fun
Coloring Book
Price: Free with ads/ Offers IAP
Coloring Book is a simple application for preschool kids to color things. The application contains more than 200 images, including animals, people, nature, and airplanes, among others, to keep the little ones entertained for hours. Coloring Book has the features zoom, to approach the smallest details, and undo option, to revert to the last action.
Kids Numbers and Math
Price: Free with ads/ Offers IAP
Kids Numbers and Math is an educational app for kids, which allows your children to enter the world of mathematics and numbers and learn them, through a friendly voice, in a fun way. The game features images and sounds to stimulate the child, but without creating a confusing environment, the main thing is learning. The game progresses in difficulty, and thus, reaping advances in mathematics goes slowly.
HomeWork
Price: Free with ads/ Offers IAP
Homework is another useful kid’s app aimed at young children attending school. With this application, your kids can schedule tasks and lessons, set reminders, review the test plan, and manage their time more effectively. The app offers tools to create, edit and manage multiple timetables and access them from homescreen widgets.
Kids Zoo
Price: Free with ads/ Offers IAP
This animal sounds & pictures games app for kids will help your babies to recognize and learn more about zoo animals through photos and sounds that they make. There are about 100 animals from Birds, Sea Animals & Reptiles, along with baby animals. Kids can tap on an image to play the sound or play as a slideshow. They can even learn to pronounce the name of each animal. There is a child lock mode for toddlers, so they won’t exit the app accidentally.
In our pick of the best free apps for kids for android, we’ve tried to cover a wide variety of interests. Although some contain in-app purchases, most of these are completely free to download and use, so your kids can try out several to find the ones they like most. It’s always nice to hear from readers about our articles, so do send us a comment and let us know which of these apps is your favorite. Happy Playtime!
My son loves Mr. potato head create and play but it’s no longer there is there a link to bring it back
Labo Paper Plate and Labo Pebble art are great build and play apps for kids.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.laboladoapp.labo_pebble_art_free
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.laboladoapp.labo_paper_plate_free