Are Yoto players worth it for children aged nearly four and six?

[Frieda86]

Ive a nearly 6 yo dd and a nearly 4 yo ds. Are Yotos worth it? How do you get the cards and how much are they?

I found the cards really expensive, even second hand. We’ve now switched to a Kids Amazon Alexa and they love it.

Yes.

We just use make your own and download audio books from the library.

Also use it for podcasts and kids radio.

My 4 year old loves hers. She puts the stories on at bedtime and uses it in car journeys / holiday (we have the mini). When she’s a bit older I think she will like listening to the stories and “reading along” with the actual books (we have some where we have the book and the Yoto card - Julia Donaldson ones for example). Agree the cards are expensive but you can get them second hand and also use for podcasts etc.

We travel a lot, the yoto mini has been so appreciated on long journeys as a screen free family. Both children received a year of yoto club memberships as Christmas presents and that built the majority of our library. They got 2 new cards each month but I only gave them one, kept the other squirrelled away and made the 'oo new card!' experience last twice as long. Tried to get a variety of cards which would grow with them to future proof us. Some of the faves are the independent author ones.

Then bought a pack of 10 make your own cards and used borrow box to update the stories on them. It's like a library book, you're asked to remove the download after a certain amount of time. Bit time consuming but worth it for budgeting purposes and works well for travel.

They've been invaluable for our household.

Yes I think so.

My 2 and 5 year olds share one. They have headphones and headphone splitters. They only have a starter pack of card and 2 cards that we made ourselves from recordings of us and other family members reading books or by uploading mp3s of audiobooks we own. The make your own cards fit so much on than the pre made cards and you can choose the picture for each track/story.

5 year old will listen to Toy Story whilst playing. It was great for travelling and really useful for keeping screen time low.

My 8 year old still uses his every night! Pops in one of the BrainBots cards and listens until he falls asleep!

Thank you everyone

An alternative is an Amazon Audible subscription ( I listen to podcasts, DH and all the children listen to books) and just have an Alexa or a Bluetooth speaker . There are thousands of free books on there and you get credits to listen to premium ones.

Absolutely worth it, DD still uses hers for podcasts at 8 years old.

We love the yoto mini - how do you use borrow box to put the stories in MYO cards please? Great idea!

We love them - both of ours use them and we never really use screens. Spent 11 hours in A&E recently and so helpful - kept us entertained the whole way through!
we have a subscription so can access lots of content/podcasts etc for both kids so we never really buy cards. One of the best things we ever purchased!

Perfect age for it. Both my kids use theirs a ton, we take it our Mini on holiday and they can listen in car, plane, at bedtime. We make our own cards as well as get premade ones.

@Notrainingbutpouring the audiobooks are downloadable files, which you can then upload onto the yoto library and add to a make your own card. Borrow box will send you an email when your loan is up, usually by which point we're ready for a new story so we just switch it. Haven't yet found an easy way to keep track of what's on each card when we change the stories so often (we were putting name stickers on at the start but ran out quickly!), but the kids seem to work it out.

Ah okay - yes bit like what we do with the yoto subscription but will def try this too!!

@Notrainingbutpouring is there a yoto subscription where you return the cards??

No our subscription is 40 a year and there’s loads of content on which changes periodically (not frequently) and you can put them on cards. Also has a lot of podcasts which you can stream to each yoto - different one to different yotos simultaneously which is super handy. We never bought cards because the subscription has been so good.

@Notrainingbutpouring this is part of the yoto club? I'll be honest we've not looked at the podcasts and things as I also try to be as screen free as possible so just want them to be able to use their cards without using my phone. But if things can go on cards then that's great!

Oh they run through the yoto and its audio, not screen! Yes - yoto club, but I do often use my phone to start it off when I haven’t had time to change all the cards. Lots of the stuff is the same as buying cards like earth explorers/brain bots except you just have access for limited time - works for us as mine like variety!