10 Great Alexa Skills for Kids Education

As schools across the country remain closed for the foreseeable future, many parents are now faced with the task of teaching their kids from home. Teaching is no easy feat, and you may be looking for some creative ways to supplement your kids’ learning while also giving you a break from the job. Luckily, you may not have to look very far — just look to your favorite Amazon Alexa smart home device!

What is Amazon Alexa?

Alexa is Amazon.com’s proprietary voice command and virtual assistant service. Similar to Apple’s Siri, Alexa is the AI technology used in devices such as the Amazon Echo Dot, the Echo Show, and others. Alexa is incredibly intelligent and able to recognize human speech and voice commands. You can ask Alexa to do a wide variety of tasks, from checking the weather to adding a meeting to your calendar to setting a timer for those brownies baking in the oven.

What Are Alexa Skills?

Alexa skills are essentially built-in apps that you can enable to enhance your Alexa’s capabilities. Each Alexa already comes programmed with a wide variety of skills, which you can choose to enable or disable depending on your needs. If you’re wanting to broaden your Alexa’s skill set, you can add on additional Alexa skills by using the Alexa mobile app.

What Can Alexa Do for Kids?

Alexa isn’t just a handy tool for busy adults. Kids can also benefit from Alexa’s breadth of knowledge, specifically when it comes to education. There are a variety of Alexa kids skills to enable and enhance your child's learning. Below, we answer some commonly asked questions regarding Alexa for kids.

How do you turn on child skills on Alexa?

Child skills, also known as “kid skills,” are Alexa skills that are specifically designed for children. Child skills are turned off by default on all Alexa devices. To enable child skills, open the Alexa mobile app or visit alexa.amazon.com. Then, go to the “Settings” section of the app or website and turn on kid skills.

Is Echo Dot child friendly?

Yes, the Echo Dot, along with other Alexa devices, is child friendly. Thanks to Alexa’s kid skills, the Echo Dot and other Amazon/Alexa devices can accomplish a wide variety of kid-specific tasks, including telling stories, playing special animal sounds, and assisting with math homework.

Can Alexa help my kid do better in school?

While Alexa certainly is no substitute for formal education, it does offer an incredible amount of knowledge right from your own home. Even without enabling special education-specific skills, your Alexa device already comes equipped with a variety of educational abilities. For example, Alexa can act as a dictionary, a thesaurus, or a calculator.

That being said, you may want to expand Alexa’s abilities by enabling kid-specific educational skills. There is no shortage of educational Alexa skills to enable on your favorite Amazon device, and we’ll get to our favorites below!

Kids & Alexa

Alexa and similar voice-recognition technologies are becoming increasingly more common in households around the world. In fact, it’s not unusual for “Alexa” to be one of a child’s first words these days!

Parents who are just getting started with Alexa may have some concerns about their children using the virtual assistant. Common concerns about kids using Alexa and similar technology include children becoming lazier or mistaking the AI technology as human. Others may worry about Alexa’s limitations in understanding children’s speech. And of course, there are concerns about how Alexa uses children’s personal information.

All of this being said, Alexa can prove to be a useful tool for the whole family as long as you understand the ins and outs of this powerful AI technology. And your favorite Amazon devices can be made even more intelligent by enabling educational Alexa skills for kids.

Top 10 Alexa Educational Skills for Kids

Now that you know a little bit about Alexa and its kid-specific capabilities, here are, in our opinion, the best Alexa skills for kids. All of these kids Alexa skills are free to enable on your favorite Amazon device:

1. This Day in History

Created by The History Channel, the “This Day in History” Alexa skill is perfect for kids in sixth grade and above. Kids can simply say, “Alexa, launch This Day in History” to hear the most notable historical events that happened today or any other day of the year. This skill isn’t just reserved for kids, though — parents themselves may find this skill to be a great way to start their day and enhance their general history knowledge. This skill does not require parent permissions.

Ideal for kids ages five through 12, Kids Quiz! is an educational trivia-style skill that quizzes kids across a variety of subjects. Kids can select the categories they want to be quizzed on, which range from science to brain teasers. One of the best features of this Alexa skill is that it offers different difficulty levels for kids of different ages, ensuring that things stay interesting and challenging for youngsters. Kids Quiz! requires parent permissions to enable.

Whether your child is preparing for the SAT or simply wanting to brush up their vocabulary, you can’t go wrong with the SAT Word of the Day Alexa skill. Created by YourDictionary.com, this skill shares with you some of the most popular vocabulary words and how to spell them. To take things a step further, the skill gives you an example of how to use the vocabulary word in a sentence. SAT Word of the Day is perfect for kids ages 12 and up and does not require parent permissions.

Education meets exercise with the Animal Workout skill. Ideal for little ones up to age 7, this skill instructs kids to act like various animals while engaging in physical activity. As a bonus, Alexa will give you fun facts about each of the animals so that kids can gain some knowledge while having fun pretending to be their favorite creatures. This skill requires parent permissions.

Designed for kids up to fifth grade, Math Facts helps kiddos practice addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. The skill is easy to set up — kids can choose what math skill to focus on and Math Facts will give them five questions in that category to answer. This is a wonderful Alexa skill for helping your kid gain more confidence in math class, especially if they may be struggling with one or more concepts. Math Facts requires parent permissions to enable.

Travel to the stars with this science Alexa skill! Ideal for kids ages 11 and up, the NASA Mars skill provides you with real-time updates straight from the Red Planet and NASA team members. Learn what NASA’s Mars rovers are up to, from their latest discoveries to their most recent activity. In addition to mission updates, your child can ask Alexa general Mars-related questions to enhance their knowledge about our neighboring planet. The NASA Mars skill does not require parent permissions.

Designed to improve your child’s listening comprehension skills, Bamboo Books provides a ton of classic children’s stories that both kids and adults will love. The skill sorts the stories into three levels, ranging from beginner favorites like Little Red Riding Hood and The Story of the Three Bears to more advanced tales like The Jungle Book, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and Treasure Island. Because it offers so much variety, your kids can really grow up with this skill as they strengthen and develop their own comprehension abilities. This skill requires parent permissions.

This entertaining Alexa skill uses an adventure game to put your child’s spelling skills to the test. In MasterSwords, kids are tasked with traveling through four kingdoms to retrieve stolen swords. They’ll defeat villains along the way by successfully spelling words, getting them closer and closer to achieving their goals. This skill disguised as a game offers users three difficulty levels to choose from so that the whole family can get involved. MasterSwords requires parent permissions to run.

Ideal for high schoolers and beyond, National Geographic’s Geo Quiz skill tests and enhances kids’ and adults’ global knowledge. With six new questions released every day, this trivia-style skill will stay fresh and keep your kid coming back for more. Adults will love this skill just as much as their kids — you’ll be able to impress all your friends at your next event with all the knowledge you’ve gained! This skill does not require parent permissions.

Perfect for high school students and older, Curiosity dives deep into thousands of subjects with in-depth, interesting facts to expand your child’s understanding of the world. From current events to psychology to astronomy, Curiosity leaves no stone unturned when it comes to learning. This is an outstanding educational skill that parents and kids alike will look forward to every day, and it can easily become a part of your daily routine together as a family. Curiosity does not require parent permissions to enable.

Educational Alexa Skills for Kids: Get Your Child Excited to Learn

There are so many educational skills on Alexa for kids of all ages, and we can’t wait for you to discover them! With so many options out there, it’s easy to make learning fun, right from your very own home.

If you’re ready to enable some kids Alexa skills, why not get your kiddo even more excited by having them pick out a custom Alexa skin? Check out our Amazon skins and wraps for all of your favorite Alexa devices, including the Echo Dot, Echo Show, Fire TV Stick, and more.