I went to London a week or so ago with the kids, braving the tube on my own with the two of them. The stress of that journey was well worth it, as we had a really lovely morning at the Amazon Super Summer Event finding out more about the new original kids content they are launching in time for the summer holidays.
Party entertainment was provided by Gabriella & Octavia who organise “exquisite children’s parties” and did a fantastic job of keeping the kids happy and allowed the adults freedom to relax and find out more about the Amazon Prime Instant Video service and the new FreeTime features on the Kindle Fire. I really appreciated the great job they did keeping the kids entertained and also the lovely party bags each child got to take home, too. I’ve never seen Georgie take part so much in anything like that before, and the sky high fun level made the hours of travelling worth it for the kids as well as for me.
We have been Amazon Prime Instant Video customers since February and are very pleased with the service, on the whole. The selection of kids content is excellent, keeping Georgie happy with lots of Peppa Pig, Dora the Explorer, and Go Diego Go! This offering of children’s entertainment has only been improved with the addition of the original kids content that Amazon have created.
Tumble Leaf and Creative Galaxy, both aimed at preschool-aged children, have both been available since last month and Georgie has been enjoying them both since they popped up on the iPad app. In fact, Georgie is next to me on the sofa watching Creative Galaxy as I type this post!
Tumble Leaf is a show about Fig the Fox and his best friend Stick (a caterpillar who can be seen in the picture above on his shoulder), a duo full of curiosity who “discover adventure, friendship and love around every bend.” The show is educational as well as entertaining, with themes of exploration and science. Sweet stories are wound around concepts such as reflection and shadows; with the characters working out how things work. Georgie loves to learn and things like shadows fascinate her so she has really been enjoying it.
Creative Galaxy is about different types of art – characters Arty and Epiphany travel around the galaxy, solving problems with with art and aims to inspire creative thinking through crafting, music and dancing. At the end of each animated show, a live-action section shows children demonstrating whichever art technique has been explored in the show. It is really quite educational about art, actually telling children about great masters and different types of art. I love that each show gives you a project that you can do with your child – perfect for keeping kids entertained during the summer holidays.
The animation of both shows is very good, with Creative Galaxy drawn in a traditional and very colourful cartoon style, and Tumble Leaf using stop-motion animation. The characters are all very likeable (especially considering how irritating some kids shows can be!) and the Tumble Leaf characters in particular are very sweet. I enjoy both shows as well as Georgie. Tumble Leaf has a free game for the Kindle Fire as well, which has gone down well with our little girl.
The third show being launched on Amazon Prime Instant Video this summer is Annedroids, which we were lucky enough to see the first UK screening of. It’s a fun live-action show about a young girl genius, her human friends and androids, as they experiment and make scientific discoveries. It premieres on Friday and is aimed at 4 to 7 year olds. I really enjoyed the episode we watched, which introduced the characters. The show is appealing and enjoyable to watch, and I think Georgie will enjoy it when she is a little older than she is right now (she just turned 3 in May).
As well as the children getting fantastic age appropriate goody bags from the event, I was given a Kindle Fire HDX 7″
to take home so that we could try out the new kids content, and play with the new FreeTime feature which allows you to create user accounts with strict controls for your children.
Georgie got to grips with the Kindle immediately and was soon happily watching the episodes of Tumble Leaf and Creative Galaxy that I downloaded for her, and playing with some apps. FreeTime was easy to set up and you can control what content is available to your children on a child-by-child basis which is nice; rather than just having a kids mode you have one profile per child and can pick and choose what settings and content each one has.
In addition to limiting the content they can access, you can use the settings to determine time limits and so on, so that they can’t play past a certain time or for too long… or a combination of both – for example, you can allow up to an hour of screen time between 8am and 8pm. You can even limit the screen time by activity, dividing their limit between books, videos and apps. A nice touch is different settings being possible for weekdays & weekends, and the Educational Goals setting which allows you to block access to entertainment content until they have spent enough time on their educational content.
I was disappointed that although you can download Prime Instant Video content to watch offline, you can only have purchased content available in FreeTime, meaning that Georgie wasn’t able to be in FreeTime and access the Peppa Pig episodes that were downloaded to the device. The first episodes of Tumble Leaf and Creative Galaxy are free to purchase which means I was able to download these and put them into FreeTime.
The device itself is lovely, it is pleasant to hold and the screen is fantastic, really crisp with colours looking bright. The UI is easy to navigate and I actually prefer it to the android tablets I’ve tried in the past. James has claimed it has his own although I think in reality we will all be sharing it.
As well as all of the kids content available on Prime, there is a huge selection of adult content. With more than 15,000 popular movies and TV episodes, we can always find something to watch and we have been consistently impressed with the quality of streaming. The yearly £79 price tag is well worth it in our opinion, which works out at around £6.59 per month – we have dumped subscription TV service in favour of our YouView box and on-demand services and we are saving a lot of money, and enjoy the luxury of having so much content accessible on all our various devices.
You can try out Amazon Prime for 30-days for free, and don’t forget that Prime membership also comes with the perks of one-day delivery on over 7 million items from Amazon and access to 500,000 Kindle books to borrow. That one-day delivery has proved very useful in this house – you can get bargain priced nappies and all sorts of other necessities with free one-day delivery!
It was so good to see you again! We’re still enjoying Prime too x
Sounds like an amazing experience! Great post 🙂
XoXo Shea L.
That sounds like a fabulous event. I was gutted to miss it. We’re Prime customers too but I’ve not really fully investigated their video function – I mainly like the free next day delivery! I will have to investigate. Thanks for linking up to #WHWH