After learning for a little while, three- and four-year-olds want to go and play, and that is perfectly natural at their age. Playtime is how Dino Kids fits play in between lessons without letting it crowd out the learning: your child finishes a lesson and earns a ticket, each ticket opens one short round of play, the round ends by itself, and your child goes back to learning. You decide how many lessons earn a ticket, or whether your child can simply play freely; the next article, on play ticket rules, shows how.

In a living room full of floor cushions, a girl holds up a yellow ticket, her little brother plays a game on a tablet, and the green dinosaur mascot dances among soap bubbles

How your child gets into Playtime

1. Tap the Playtime banner on the home screen

The Playtime banner sits right on the home screen. This part belongs to your child, so there is no parental gate: they can tap it themselves.

Home screen saying Hi Mia! with switch-child, question mark and settings buttons at the top, Art, Learn languages, Math and Music, and below them the orange Playtime banner with the Dino and tickets ×6
The Playtime banner on the home screen, with the number of tickets your child has

2. Meet the Dino and choose a game

At the top of the screen is your child's Dino. It starts as an egg, hatches, and grows with the stars your child collects while learning. Next to it, a row of tickets shows how many tickets your child has. Below are the games, along with the Sticker Bag and Badges (scroll to the bottom to see Badges), where your child can see everything they have collected.

Playtime: the Dino, a bubble saying 2 play tickets with tickets ×2, and tiles for Letter Bubbles, Catch the Color, Count and Tap, Glow Doodle, Maze, Join the numbers, Flip cards and Sticker Bag
The Dino, the tickets and the games

Seven games

  • Letter Bubbles: for 30 seconds, your child pops the bubbles carrying the letter the app asks for. From the home screen the letters follow the app's language (lowercase a–z in English); straight after a Japanese lesson they switch to hiragana, so playing is also a little revision.
  • Catch the Color: your child catches the colour they hear.
  • Count and Tap: your child taps as many stars as the app asks for.
  • Glow Doodle: everything they draw looks lovely. This one is always open, no ticket needed.
  • Maze, Join the numbers and Flip cards: 100 puzzles each. For these three, one ticket is one puzzle.
Letter Bubbles in play: a countdown ring, Find this one with the letter s, and bubbles s and q floating up
Letter Bubbles: pop the bubbles with the right letter
Maze 1 in play: a blue line from the green dot, Dino the dinosaur at its end showing where the child is, a yellow star as the goal, a pad with up, down, left and right arrows under the maze so the hand never covers the paths, and trophy and restart buttons at the top
Maze: one ticket is one puzzle

How your child earns tickets

Tickets only come after lessons: colouring a picture and getting stars for it, finishing a Getting ready for school lesson, writing a letter all the way through, and so on. Once your child has done the number of lessons your rule asks for, a small You got a play ticket! note appears in the top right corner for about three seconds, then fades away. It has no buttons and doesn't block your child's finger, so the lesson carries on and nothing pulls your child off into a game. When it is time to play, your child goes back to the home screen and taps the Playtime banner. Tickets don't expire. Stickers earned after lessons are kept in the Sticker Bag in Playtime.

When the tickets run out, the Dino says "Go back and learn to get more play tickets!", and the games that need a ticket fade and show a ticket badge in the corner. Only Glow Doodle stays bright, because it never needs a ticket.

Good to know

  • Playtime needs no account and no connection.
  • Each child has their own tickets. Tickets, stickers and the Dino stay on the device and don't sync to other devices.
  • The ticket rule is set for the whole device and shared by every child; how many lessons earn a ticket can depend on your child's age.
  • If your child opens a game and leaves before playing, they get their ticket back.