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Curious if any gerbils here forwent the kids edition and bought something like the Fire HD 8 for a kid around 5 years old? My son is very in tune with tech (big surprise) and is very careful when grabbing my or his moms phone. I'm thinking that maybe this would be the year for him to get a device of his own for some learning games.

So thoughts?????

My 6 and 8 year old have had a Nexus 7 each for nearly 2 years. Biggest issue is locking down YouTube time and limiting overall time on them. They are by far their favorite toys, not even a competition.

Keep them in a locked box when not in use, and they NEVER travel into the bedroom. It is a difficult addiction to manage for kids and still provide a well-rounded life. Scares me sometimes.

liquidsquid wrote:

Keep them in a locked box when not in use, and they NEVER travel into the bedroom. It is a difficult addiction to manage for kids and still provide a well-rounded life. Scares me sometimes.

It should scare you. The internet is kind of a scary for the young ones with all these mobile devices that we did not have growing up.

Welch wrote:

Curious if any gerbils here forwent the kids edition and bought something like the Fire HD 8 for a kid around 5 years old? My son is very in tune with tech (big surprise) and is very careful when grabbing my or his moms phone. I'm thinking that maybe this would be the year for him to get a device of his own for some learning games.

So thoughts?????

I got my niece and nephew Fire 7 Kids tablets last year (6 and 4 at the time). I believe they have more granular parental controls (hours / times per day) etc. And you control which apps go on there (no default Google stuff, Chrome / YouTube / email nothing).

It may be worth looking into.

Yeah the 8 is $49.99 right now, and I put one on order.

I agree that I don't want my kid to become screen addicted. Luckily, the Fire Tablets apparently let you have some of the best parental controls, to include (from my understanding) the ability for your kids to earn free time for things like Netflix! He is almost 5, so we want to do more educational stuff on there as we will be homeschooling him for now.

We thought long and hard about it and decided that we didn't want a full-fat tablet for the kids. They have a LeapPad which has some great truly-education games. I have yet to find any "educational" games for iOS, but I didn't look as closely at the Android/Fire marketplace. My wife and my stance is that the tablet is too much unidirectional entertainment versus interactive. I'm more ok with Netflix being on in the TV in the living room, because they never sit still long enough to stay watching it. It's more background noise while playing Lego or domino-ing, plus we can control that. It's entirely parental preference though. For reference ours are 6 & 2, and so far homeschooling the older one has worked out well.

Hey Comp! Long time no see. Glad to see someone else homeschooling, we have been un-officially "homeschooling" him but he will be going into it this coming year. He turns 5 in May and my daughter will be 3 in September, so similar in age to your kids.

This past year or so we haven't been the best about keeping the kids off of Netflix. My wife has her last 2 finals this week and she will complete her degree. On top of living in a construction zone as I build the house (garage) around us, running Netflix has been our only saving grace, it really kills me to say that. At least this summer their mom wont have anything else to do but work with them and most of our house work and subsequent debt from building should be done.

I looked at the leap frog thing but always felt that closed of a system would lead to having to buy just their stuff and the cost adding up. I figured this might be a good way to teach him how to take care of something of his own and to learn to earn things. It most certainly isn't going to be something he can use whenever he feels like it. My son does amazingly well at his age to rationalize earning things, hoping for the best. We shall see, this is new territory for all parties involved.

On an aside, what programs have you found success in for homeschooling? Any specific funding you can recommend pursuing?

I can't speak for the Fire, but one thing I like about the Android tablets is profiles. You can restrict a profile that only has access to specific apps on the main one. We downloaded only the ones my oldest, 5, was allowed to access and then locked it down. The biggest problem we've had is ads. I think the Fires have a kid mode but I doubt you'll get away from the ads.

We've since unrestricted the tablet. She is still 5 but has grown in maturity enough to only go where she is supposed to and ask before she downloads anything. She is obviously not a typical kid (in the best way possible!). My point in sharing my story is that you know it is possible for kids to be mature enough to handle the responsibility if you set the expectation and enforce with grace and love the standards set forth.

Fun side note, the tablet is the one I bought at the BBQ swap!

EDIT:since it came up right before Iposted, we, too, use it for home school. ABC mouse works great. Time for learning not so much. She watches Youtube, though, on subjects she is working on, like planets, clocks, money counting, "carrying" math, etc.

Both of my kids have fire tablet 8 or 7's and they have had them for about 3 years. ($35 each!) They would have been 9 and 6 at the time we got them.
These were upgrades from leap-pads they had previous.
We got them foam protectors and screen protectors for them also which worked really well.

Both have parental controls turned on.
I use opendns to lock down internet access for for non pc devices suck as phones, tablets, and the wii. Youtube is 100% disabled.
Kid's windows 10 machines are also on opendns and have microsoft family turned on so the Wife can monitor their usage. Kids windows accounts are also standard user account so they can't break anything too bad. Son loves his chrome junk plugins (CATS ARE SO CUTE DAD!) and then wonders why keeps getting massive numbers of pop-ups and pop-unders so I have to clean em all off. He is getting better about it though.

Adult machines use either 8.8.8.8 or 9.9.9.9 as their dns instead to bypass opendns.

Welch wrote:

I looked at the leap frog thing but always felt that closed of a system would lead to having to buy just their stuff and the cost adding up. I figured this might be a good way to teach him how to take care of something of his own and to learn to earn things.

We bought them both on Craigslist, and the cartridges frequently are on sale on Wal-Mart or Target for <$10. Our local used kids store (once-upon-a-child) carries both the individual games and the "tablets"
The quality of games is also top-notch. Much better compared to comparable iOS/Android from my experience. It's almost like they go through better QC when there is no
A big selling feature is the whole table has no ads. You pay for the game and no microtransactions.

Welch wrote:

On an aside, what programs have you found success in for homeschooling? Any specific funding you can recommend pursuing?

We're very much in the do-our-own-thing. A separate curriculum per subject, versus a all-subjects-included type kit. I love Saxon math, which is what I used while homeschooled, growing up. I don't remember the other curriculum names off the top of my head.
One thing we are a stickler about for us is that the curriculum not be a 5-day week type setup. We vary the time spent on each subject each day. We might do 3 lessons of Math on Monday and no reading, but the next day double up on the reading. Also while going on trips or vacation and stuff we might compress the week into a few days, or we might spread it out differently. The flexibility is actually one of our biggest reasons for homeschooling.
We're also moderately active in the FPEA, a state homeschooling association, which has an annual convention here in Orlando. I love going to the lecture/seminars and seeing what other people are doing and learning from their experiences.