We love the Amazon Fire for tablets (and so do our kids!). They come packed with loads of great games book, tv shows and apps for kids. When we reviewed the best tablets for toddlers, the Amazon ones came out on top thanks to the low price, great content and amazing guarantee.
In this post, we want to focus on some of the things that you can do with your Amazon kids tablet that you might not realise exist, so it is a kind of Amazon Fire kids tablet tips and tricks guide.
These tablets are very straightforward to use, even for very young kids, but setting them up isn’t always the most user-friendly experience so if you have recently bought a Fire tablet then you might like to check out our guide to setting up an Amazon Fire for Kids tablet alongside this post.
Amazon Fire Tablets are Awesome
Our favourite is the Amazon Fire HD 10 kids edition tablet. It is available at a great low price and has everything that your child needs on a nice big screen.
It comes with some of the best children’s safety features so there is no need to be concerned over what your child might see or buy.
It also comes pre-loaded with great kids content (games, books, tv shows etc).
On top of all this, there is an amazing 2-year guarantee that means Amazon will replace it no questions asked (even if your child throws it in the bath!)
Reasons to pick the Amazon Fire HD 10
- Amazing Price
- 2-year guarantee
- Brilliant kids security features
- Robust case included
- Tonnes of great age-appropriate content
( if you like the sound of this but want to save some money, the smaller Fire HD 8 and Fire 7 tablets are also brilliant).
It is worth getting some headphones for your child (unless you really want them blasting out their cartoons and games across the house/car/plane!).
We have reviewed the best kids headphones in this post. The key thing is to get ones that are volume limited for delicate eardrums – we like these ones the best.
5 Things you can do on an Amazon Fire for Kids Tablet (that you might not have thought of!)
Set Educational Goals
One of the great things about the Amazon kids tablets is that they are a totally safe environment with all the content screened and age rated. You also get great parental controls so you can do things like limit the amount of screentime that they are allowed depending on what day of the week it is etc.
That’s, great but I think you would expect that. One feature that goes above and beyond this is the ability to set educational goals to unlock content.
You can distinguish between different types of content and set challenges for your little one. For example, you can set it so that at certain times they can use their tablet to read books, but not to play games or surf the internet.
Or, you can set it to ‘learn first’ so that they need to read a book or play an educational game for a certain amount of time before the rest of the content is unlocked.
Hide Profiles on the Lock Screen
A great feature of these tablets is that you can set the age range of the content so that your toddler doesn’t randomly jab on an icon that opens up something aimed at an 11-year-old.
If your kids are sharing a tablet it is possible to hide profiles on the lock screen so that your younger children don’t go into the wrong profile by mistake.
Select Content
As we said, the content that comes with Amazon Kids+ is already age rated so you don’t need to worry too much about what they see. But maybe you have a particularly sensitive child or you just don’t want your child to watch a particular show for whatever reason. Well, fear not because Amazon has got you covered and you can easily add or remove specific titles from your child’s profile.
This works both ways so maybe you want your child to have more advanced science content but not scarier books, you can just select the titles that you think are appropriate. Or if you want to make a more general change you can dial down the overall age group for you child.
Listen to Books
When you buy an Amazon kids tablet you get a year of free access to Amazon Kids+ which gives you access to loads of great content. Of course, there are loads of games and TV shows, but you also get access to lots of children’s audiobooks.
There are lots of classic fairy tales available like Cinderella, Rapunzel and Little Red Riding Hood. And also some more modern stories. The titles available change from time to time, at the moment there are some Stella Batts stories and The Cookie Girl available, amongst others.
If you pay extra for an Audible subscription then you will be able to access a huge range of stories.
Too Many Photos?
Kids and quickly fill up the memory card with thousands of blurry photos of their noses or your carpet. A cool trick to get rid of them is to download ES File Explorer from Amazon’s Appstore and use this to select images and delete them.
If you don’t want to be doing this too often you could always disable the camera on your child’s profile, but we think it’s a good feature for them to use and learn from so we don’t do this.
Amazon Fire for Kids Tips and Tricks
We hope that you have enjoyed reading this blog and that you have found some of these tips useful.
Be sure to check out our guide to using a Fire tablet and Amazon Kids+ to get a better idea of what content is available on your Amazon kid’s tablet. It is free for the first year and after that, you can choose to pay to continue your subscription or not.