Understanding emotions can be challenging for children, especially those with special needs like autism. Hopster Saturday Club – Empathy is an app for children made to help “develop a child’s fundamental social and emotional literacy skills.”
As children play through the fun mini-games within the app, they’ll begin to recognize and understand multiple emotions. They’ll also learn lots of new “feeling words” to describe how they and the game’s characters are feeling.
It was developed with the support of EmpathyLab, which is a UK nonprofit organization that helps children better understand empathy and put it into action. The app builds on primary school activities to help build real-life empathy skills.
While playing the Hopster Saturday Club – Empathy app, children will learn to:
- Use emotional vocabulary
- Recognize facial expressions
- Match feelings and expressions
- Understand their own emotions
- Feel and show empathy for others
Overview of the Hopster Saturday Club – Empathy app:
- According to the app’s description, “With this game and Hopster’s Saturday Club show, we want to help promote overall emotional literacy in kids, so they can express how they feel and recognize feelings in others more readily”
- The Saturday Club cartoon follows the adventures of four friends: Tian, Jo, Suzie, and Jamie – as they act out situations and put themselves in others’ shoes to better understand how others feel
- Game features:
- Match emotions to a character’s expressions
- Create your own expressions with the Saturday Club characters
- Keep track of feelings with the emotions calendar
- Bonus! Once you install “Hopster Saturday Club – Empathy”, you’ll automatically get access tot he Saturday Club emotions stickers in iMessage
- The app’s description covers the importance of preschool kids learning empathy:
- Children with a strong sense of empathy are more likely to be resilient, patient, tolerant of difference
- They’ll also make better decisions and are more likely to reject negative peer pressure and bullying
- Helps develop strong social bonds with others
- Linked to achieving success in school and beyond
Check it out on the App Store for free to learn more!