Toca Life: After School
By Mieke VanderBorght,
Common Sense Media Reviewer
Common Sense Media Reviewers
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Toca Life: After School
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What’s It About?
Come in out of the rain and let loose at the TOCA LIFE: AFTER SCHOOL clubhouse. Play is entirely open-ended and consists of kids moving around objects and up to 27 characters. Each of four floors offers a different activity to explore: a skate park, dance studio, art workshop, and sports court, plus extras like showers, snack bar, and nap area. Use the elevator to move from floor to floor and the video feature to record up to two minutes of a story.
Is It Any Good?
Kids can easily -- and virtually -- try out some new hobbies with this app-based activity set. Just like all the Toca Life apps, Toca Life: After School has no rules, no limits, and no instructions. Kids simply explore and discover as much or as little as they want. Toca Life: After School seems to have a few more interactive elements than some of the others in the series. Kids can paint, make music, swoosh a basketball through a hoop and keep track of points on a scoreboard, or send a skateboarder down a half pipe, for example. These small opportunities make the after-school clubhouse more interactive. Yet, since it's a digital world, kids don't have the limitless possibilities of traditional pretend play. Here they are constrained by what the programmers have written into the app. Occasionally, it's also difficult to manipulate the tiny pieces, getting them to go where you want, especially for kids with less fine-motor control. The Record option is a fun way for kids to tell, save, and share their stories.
Talk to Your Kids About ...
Families can talk about the worlds kids create in Toca Life: After School. Ask questions about who different characters represent, what they're doing, and why.
Encourage offscreen pretend play with tea sets, dolls, stuffed animals, action figures, cardboard boxes, and more.
Let your kids experiment with a wide range of hobbies or extracurricular activities. Do they like to dance? Play sports? Make music? Help them find their passions. Just remember to give them time: Don't overwhelm them by trying everything out at once!
Discuss storytelling. If your kid wants to use the app to tell stories, encourage him or her to have a beginning, a middle, and an end and to use the recording feature in the app.
App Details
- Devices: iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad, Android, Kindle Fire
- Subjects: Language & Reading: storytelling, Arts: dance, painting, Hobbies: sports
- Skills: Creativity: imagination
- Pricing structure: Paid
- Release date: March 22, 2018
- Category: Education
- Topics: Sports and Martial Arts, Arts and Dance
- Publisher: Toca Boca
- Version: 1.0
- Minimum software requirements: iOS 8.0 or later; Android 4.4 and up
- Last updated: January 23, 2019
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