Every deck here does the same simple thing: it shows one clear picture or word, says it out loud, and moves on. No scores, no levels, no characters to collect. That sounds unambitious until you watch a two-year-old work out that the round red thing on the screen is called an apple — which is the entire job at that age, and it does not need gamifying.
There are decks and games covering letters, numbers, colors, shapes, animals, fruits, body parts, food, vehicles, weather, emotions, greetings, opposites, sight words and phonics, plus drag-and-drop matching games that ask your child to pair a picture with its written name. A set of them is free to use in the browser on a phone, tablet or laptop; the rest are included in the app.
Pick by age rather than by subject. A two-year-old and a five-year-old need genuinely different things — one is learning to name pictures, the other to sound out words — and handing a toddler the phonics deck usually just teaches them that this is boring. We have shortlisted the decks worth starting with for toddlers aged 2–3, preschoolers aged 3–4 and 5 year olds, each with a short note on what that age is actually working on.
Every deck has a gear icon with parent settings behind it: change the timer speed, switch between in-order and random, mute the audio, or pause autoplay and tap through at your child's own pace. Random order is worth using once a deck feels easy — it is how you tell whether your child recognises the cards or has memorised the sequence.
Get every deck in the app
All the flashcard decks and matching games, nothing locked, and it works offline. $3.99 a month — cancel any time.
Subscription billed through the App Store. Some decks on this site are free to use in your browser.