52 Free Kids Games and Learning Sites, With the Paywalls Marked

52 Free Kids Games and Learning Sites

A coding class for children charges by the month to open Scratch. Scratch is free. MIT runs it, 200 million kids create on it, and nobody in that classroom is getting a secret version.

That is the deal with most kids’ enrichment. The teaching is free and public. What you pay for is someone to find it, schedule it, and sit next to your child. Sometimes that is worth the money. Most of the time it is a URL with a markup.

I went through every link below while writing this. A few in the version that circulates on social media were dead, mistyped, or not free at all, so I swapped them out and marked the best ones: (ads), (login), (trial), (partial). Everything without a label costs nothing to use today.

Coding and logic

Scratch MIT’s block editor. Browser only, no ads, free forever. The default first stop from about 8.
ScratchJr The same idea for ages 5 to 7 on a tablet. Drag a block, the cat walks.
Code.org Free K-12 computer science curriculum, now folded into the CodeAI branding. Teachers get lesson plans, not just links.
Blockly Games Eight puzzles that teach loops, angles, and functions. The last one is a tower defense game written in JavaScript. No account.
CodeCombat Type real Python or JavaScript to move a hero through a dungeon. (partial) The early levels are free, the rest wants a subscription.
Microsoft MakeCode Free editor for micro:bit, Minecraft, and Arcade. Arcade is the hook: build a game with blocks, then flip it to JavaScript.
Hour of AI The Hour of Code team’s AI edition. One-hour activities, kindergarten to adult, some with no device at all.

Ages 3 to 6

Khan Academy Kids Free app for ages 2 to 8, with over 5,000 reading, phonics, and math activities. No ads, no in-app purchases, made by the nonprofit. The rare one that behaves like a public service.
ABC Kids: Tracing & Phonics Trace uppercase and lowercase letters with a finger, hear the sound, match it. Free, no ads, no in-app purchases, and the menus are locked away from small fingers. Ages 2 to 5, English alphabet only.
Starfall Phonics and early reading. The learn-to-read path is free; the extras want a membership. (partial)
PBS Kids Games and full episodes from public television. The PBS Kids Games app carries 280+ of them in English and Spanish, with no ads. Free.
Sesame Street Games, videos, and coloring pages from the show. Free.
CCTV-14 Kids China’s public children’s channel: cartoons, songs, and the long-running 大风车 and 智慧树 shows. Free, Mandarin only, and the live channel is easier in the CCTV app. Useful if you want a second language early.

Reference and homework

National Geographic Kids Animals, quizzes, and the Weird But True series. Free with ads. (ads)
Smithsonian Kids Games, activities, and objects from the museums. Free.
Britannica Kids A real encyclopedia, written for children. (trial) Seven days, then a subscription. Worth a week before a big project.
Ducksters Plain explanations of history, geography, and science. Dated design, honest content, free with ads. (ads)
China Digital Science and Technology Museum The national science museum’s free online magazine, including 科学开开门, a children’s series that tells a story and then explains the science in it. Mandarin only.

Science and space

Science Buddies Over a thousand project guides with materials lists, cost, difficulty, and time. Filter by age before you promise anything.
PhET University of Colorado’s simulations. Build a circuit, slide a skater down a ramp, watch a wave. Free, no login, runs on a school laptop.
NASA Space Place Games, crafts, and skywatching tips. Try DSN Uplink-Downlink, where you aim real antennas at spacecraft.
NASA Earth for Kids Climate, weather, and the planet from orbit. Free.
ESA Kids Europe’s space agency for children. Paxi the alien, Rosetta cartoons, games, more than a dozen languages.
Exploratorium Science Snacks are museum exhibits shrunk to a kitchen table. Cheap materials and the explanation of why it works.
The Kid Should See This Hand-picked videos for curious kids, sorted by subject. No feed to fall into.
Mystery Science Ready-made elementary science lessons. The free access runs through a school trial; the full units are paid. (trial)

Math

NRICH Cambridge’s problem bank. Not drills: puzzles that need a pencil, a table, and an argument.
Math Playground Games and logic puzzles by grade. Free with ads, premium optional. (ads)
ANTON Free school practice from preschool to grade 8: math, reading, science, languages, more than 200,000 exercises. No ads, no subscription for the content, and it runs in the browser too. The in-app purchases are a tip jar with offline downloads.
Bedtime Math One wacky word problem a day, written for parents to read aloud. Free.
Mathigon Interactive textbooks and Polypad, a digital manipulative that replaces a drawer of plastic blocks. Polypad needs no account.

Reading and libraries

Storyline Online Actors from the SAG-AFTRA Foundation read picture books aloud with the illustrations on screen. Kate Winslet, Bryan Cranston, Kathy Bates. Teacher guide for every book.
StoryWeaver Pratham Books’ open library. Thousands of picture books in dozens of languages, much of it Creative Commons, so you can print and keep.
International Children’s Digital Library Books from around the world in their original languages. The old reader broke and was rebuilt, plainer but working.
Free Kids Books PDF picture books, chapter books, and open textbooks. Free to download.
Oxford Owl Oxford University Press gives away an eBook library for ages 3 to 11, leveled the way schools level them. (login)
Unite for Literacy Simple photo books with narration, including languages families actually speak at home.
Reading Bear A free phonics program with videos and quizzes. Plain, thorough, and genuinely free.
Project Gutenberg Children’s Shelf Public domain classics: Alice, Oz, Treasure Island. Free forever, and full of 19th-century moralizing.

Languages, music, and art

Language Transfer The best free language course I know of. Audio lessons where the teacher talks you into deriving the grammar instead of memorizing it: Spanish, French, German, Italian, Greek, Turkish, Arabic, Swahili, Japanese. No ads, no sign-up, donation-funded, and built for teenagers and adults rather than toddlers.
Gus on the Go Language app built for toddlers. (partial) A free lite version exists; each full language is a one-time purchase.
musictheory.net Free lessons and exercises for reading music. No account, no ads, around since 2000.
Chrome Music Lab Browser experiments that make sound visible. Song Maker alone can eat an afternoon.
Quick, Draw! A neural network guesses your doodle in 20 seconds. It teaches kids how machine learning fails, and every drawing joins a public research dataset.
Art for Kids Hub Over 3,000 step-by-step drawing lessons, free on YouTube. A dad and his kids draw together.
#MetKids The Met’s children’s site, now served from the museum’s archive. The interactive map is gone, the videos and art are not.
Tate Kids Games, quizzes, and Tate Paint. Free, and it treats children like people who can look at art.

Chess, typing, and tools for parents

ChessKid Chess for children with no chat and auto-generated usernames. (partial) A free account exists, the lessons and most puzzles sit behind Gold.
Lichess Completely free, open source, no ads. The better choice once a kid can handle an adult site.
TypingClub Touch typing lessons, free for individuals, no account required. The paid version is for schools.
LEGO Education Free lesson plans and builds, sorted by grade and subject. You supply the bricks.
Common Sense Media Age ratings and honest notes on games, apps, and films. The site to check before a sleepover, not after.

The catch

Every paid class I have looked at sells one of three things: a room, a schedule, or a person who will not let your kid quit in week two. Those are real. A room full of other children is not nothing, and some kids need the appointment.

But the curriculum is sitting there for free, maintained by MIT, NASA, Oxford, and a nonprofit or two. Spend on the accountability if you need it. Do not spend on the URL.

52 Free Kids Games and Learning Sites, With the Paywalls Marked