Top 10 learning apps for young kids

Good learning apps earn their screen time through engagement, interactivity and progress tracking, and these ten, from Starfall and Teach Your Monster to Read through Khan Academy Kids and Epic, are the reliable picks for ages 2 to 8. The rules that keep them useful: books first, sessions supervised, and content checked by a parent.

Learning sources are endless today, and educational apps are among the fastest-growing: at their pandemic-era peak, a single quarter saw 470 million educational app downloads on the Apple App Store and 466 million on Google Play, and among smartphone users who download apps, half of downloads serve learning. Apps now cover everything from introducing sounds and letters to toddlers through reading, writing, facts and concepts.

Why do learning apps work?

• Convenience: accessible anytime, anywhere.
• Varied learning approaches: gamification and friends, built in.
• Cost-effectiveness: many good ones are free, and even paid ones bundle a lot under one roof.
• Engagement and interactivity: age-tuned content designed to hold attention, and to teach through play rather than lecture.
• Customisation and tracking: content matched to your child’s level, with progress visible across levels and parameters.

The ten worth installing

1. Starfall. Letters, words and sounds taught through animation; the free tier is genuinely rich, the paid tier adds maths and more. A fine first app.
2. Teach Your Monster to Read. The award-winning game series that has helped millions of children learn to read, covering the first two years from letter-sound matching to enjoying books. (It pairs perfectly with decodable readers off-screen.)
3. Lingokids. Reading and playful learning for ages 2 to 8, with basic and paid plans.
4. Duolingo. PC Magazine’s Editors’ Choice for language learning: bite-sized visual lessons, badges for achievements, and Spanish, French, German and more for ages 6 and up.
5. Khan Academy Kids. Free, developed with Stanford learning experts, aligned to early-learning frameworks, and attentive to the whole child, social-emotional learning included. Ages 2 to 8.
6. Busy Shapes. Montessori-aligned, self-directed and hands-on: young children develop logic and reasoning by exploring how objects relate and can be manipulated. Ideal for a child’s first meeting with technology.
7. Epic. Over 40,000 books, audiobooks and videos for children, on any device; a favourite of educators and home-schooling parents for interactive reading.
8. DragonBox. Maths taught entirely through games and activities, with no quizzes or assessments; children genuinely do not notice they are being taught.
9. PBS Kids Games. Hundreds of games built on beloved shows, each matched to the show’s learning theme: maths with Peg + Cat, creature powers with the Kratts, space with Ready Jet Go!
10. ABCmouse. A full early-learning curriculum for ages 2 to 8: letter recognition to reading to maths, through story videos, puzzles, songs and art, with parent-adjustable levels so the child keeps climbing.

The app is the assistant, never the teacher. The teacher is still the adult sitting alongside.

The house rules that keep apps useful

Long screen time and unsupervised access undo the benefits, so three rules hold: books come first, apps are the add-on; someone supervises, especially for the youngest; and parents check the content fits the child before handing it over. Used that way, these ten apps extend the learning day rather than replacing it, and screen time becomes the enriched environment the growing brain wants rather than the thing stealing from it.

Dr. V.S. Gayathri is a Certified Dyslexia Therapist, an Orton-Gillingham trained literacy specialist, and the founder of Flourishing Kids. She has delivered over 4,000 hours of one-to-one reading and spelling intervention, helping children across multiple countries build stronger literacy skills. For app and resource picks matched to your child’s needs, get in touch for a free 15-minute conversation.