Freetime Unlimited

Little Guy got a Kindle for Christmas. It is going to be an essential tool for our homeschool abroad  One of my favorite parts is an app only available on the new generation of Kindles, Kindle Freetime. I love it! You can set it up to only have the books, videos, and apps you want each child to have. You can set it up for each child, so they all have the materials that are right for them. You can also set up timers. You can set it for overall screen time or you can set up time by category. We currently have ours set at unlimited for books, 1 hours for videos, and 1 hour for apps. This has been an incredible app on Little Guy's new Kindle and we are so happy to be able to have and use it.

Amazon thought this wasn't enough, so they created Freetime Unlimited. For a low monthly fee, your kiddo has access to tons of apps, videos, and books that are appropriate for ages 3-8. There is a lot to choose from and you can only find some of it by doing a search. It includes some really great educational materials in all categories. It also contains a lot of fluff, more than I would like.

Little Guy has enjoyed exploring all the content, but filled his Kindle by the second week. There is so much on there that he can't find what he is looking for and some of what he does find, and grow attached to, is more toward the 8 year old level than the 5 year old level. Our free trial subscription is nearly over and I have not been won over.

I would love it if I could personalize it. With normal Freetime I have to manually select what is available for him to use, but with Unlimited it is all there. I would like to be able to at least remove things that I don't want him to have access to or that he doesn't want. It would clean up the screen so he could find his favorite things. In the meantime, we did find a handful of content that we will be buying after we end the subscription. We also got 2 weeks of free educational content that covered all of our history, science, and read-alouds since we started school back up again.

Free Music

FREEdi YouTube Downloader

I love this app! What's so great about it? You can use it to download youtube videos as MP3s on your kindle! Okay, that may have been a tad bit confusing, but it means that if you have a favorite song, especially one you can't get in the kindle music shop, you can download it as and MP3 and it is added to your music collection. This fantastic little app allowed me to add the music from Emmett Otter's Jug band Christmas to my playlist and I really like that. The added perk is that the app is also free, YAY!

Kindle Me

My birthday is coming up and we have never been good at waiting for gifts in our home. So, I am already thoroughly enjoying my Kindle Fire. I have wanted a Nook since my last birthday and Adam and I spent a lot of time deciding if it would be the Kindle or the Nook. They are basically the same thing. Amazon Prime was the deciding point for Adam. For me it was the super hard, and likely more kid safe, casing.


It has been just what all the info online said it would be, I like that in an item! The first book we borrowed from our Amazon Prime membership was The Hunger Games. We are addicted to the book, in case you were wondering. We love that you can change the font and size and even color of the screen to make it easier to read. You can change the screen brightness too.

We have been having a blast with apps too. Jayne's favorite is Angry Birds, mine is Townsmen 6 and Mighty Grocery, and Adam likes the Weather Channel and map apps. This is our first time playing with apps. They are fantastic! Plus we get a free paid app every day and have gotten some fun ones that way.

I would definitely recommend a Kindle. It has 8 hours of battery which we have used up every day since it came in the mail on Wednesday. It has a crisp clear touch screen. The size is small compared to a pad, but that means it fits in my purse. While Adam wasn't sure about getting it in the first place, we all like it and are happy we got one.

Find Kindle Fire at amazon.com. This was not a paid review, we just really like it!