Kindly Cove

What your child practices

Kindly Cove is a social and emotional learning game built around three skills that early childhood programs often call self-awareness, self-management and relationship skills:

• Naming ten feelings: happy, sad, mad and scared first, then surprised and worried, proud and frustrated, and left out and calm.
• Reading faces and bodies: where the eyebrows go, how the eyes and mouth look, and what the body is doing, like arms crossed or standing tall.
• Thinking about others: 43 short everyday moments, like a lost toy boat, not being picked for a team yet, a spilled snack or being new, and how a friend might feel.
• Helping: choosing a kind action that fits the moment, like helping look for a lost toy or asking a friend to join in.
• Calming down: three tools to practice together, a breathing bubble, counting waves and squeeze and let go.

The moments are gentle and everyday. Nobody is ever the bad guy, and the game never makes your child feel guilty or sad for leaving.

How to play

Tap Help a friend to meet five critter friends. Every question is read aloud, and the speaker button reads it again, so children who can't read yet can play on their own. As the choices are read, each one lights up.

Six kinds of practice

Mistakes that teach

A wrong pick gets a warm word and a closer look. The face clues light up one at a time on the critter and are read aloud, like "Eyebrows: pulled down low" and "Body: arms crossed, red cheeks". In a moment question, the friend turns around so your child can read the face. The wrong choice dims and your child tries again. A second miss names the feeling and makes the answer glow.

A feeling that was missed comes back at the end of the round and again in later rounds, until it sticks.

How it adapts

Children start with four feelings and two choices. Four right answers in a row on the first try add a choice, up to four, and a couple of misses take one away. When every feeling your child knows has been read right on the first try twice, the next feelings arrive. Each feeling has a memory box, and feelings that are known well come up less often.

The cove and the Feelings Book

Every round fixes up one piece of the cove, so your child watches it come back to life: a dock, a garden, paper lanterns, a sailboat, a driftwood swing, a shell path, kites and, at the end, a lighthouse that shines. After that, every round adds a party treat to the beach, and friends you helped come to play on the sand.

The Feelings Book has a page for each feeling, with its face, its clues, the moments your child saw and the calm-down tools they tried. The Calm spot on the title screen is always open for a quick breathing bubble, counting waves or squeeze and let go, any time.

For grown-ups: the corner

Press and hold For grown-ups on the title screen. You will see how often each feeling was practiced, first-try accuracy, which helpful actions were picked and which calm-down tools were tried. You can turn the little faces on the buttons off, open all ten feelings at once, pick the reading voice and speed, or start over.

Tips for grown-ups

• Make faces in a mirror together and guess each other's feelings. Point to the eyebrows and the mouth.
• When a character in a book has a feeling, ask: how can you tell? What could help?
• Practice the breathing bubble when things are calm, so it is ready when feelings get big.
• Name your own feelings out loud during the day: I feel frustrated, so I'm going to take three slow breaths.

Privacy and safety

There are no ads, accounts, chat or leaderboards, and we don't run analytics or tracking on our learning games. The game makes no outside requests, and every moment in it is gentle and family friendly. Progress is saved only on your device. It's free in the browser on a phone, tablet or computer.

Questions