Parents' Guide to Peppy Pals Social Skills

Kids get plenty of exposure to positive social themes through sweet animal characters and relatable scenarios. Social emotional learning is not always easy to address, but these the super kid-friendly videos and stories nicely demonstrate friends who work on getting along and helping each other. There's quite a bit of content to look through, and it's not always easy to navigate through it all. Some games and activities offer more interactive features and are more interesting than others. For instance, it's not always clear how much kids can actually control a storyline. In one of the more interesting activities, kids adjust the eyes and mouth of each of the animal characters to express different emotions. However, parents will have to provide some extra scaffolding to help kids label the emotions that match each expression. To take advantage of the many suggested discussion questions, Peppy Pals Social Skills works best when parents and kids use it together. Those questions can help kids make connections between the app and their offscreen lives. It would be great to have some audio that helps kids navigate the app and understand the purpose of each feature; for example, there's a game where crabs judge the characters' dives, but little kids might not be familiar with that kind of competition so might not understand. Overall, it's a thoughtfully made app that taps into skills that are often hard to reach with tech.