Toca Life World helps kids practice and improve the following skills

Self Awareness: Understanding our own actions, thoughts and feelings.

Storytelling is a great way for children to express how they are feeling especially if they are frustrated or upset. Giving children the ability to create characters, place them in situations and then ask them open-ended questions could diffuse a situation and allow the child to calm down and talk through how they are feeling. Children can also work through interactions with other people or events in their lives because of the openness of the game. And due to the amount of diversity that has been programmed into the game, children can create a character for themselves, their family, and their community that mirrors reality more than some other character-creation games. And due to the wide range of locations that are possible, children can tell stories about school, the doctor’s office, the barber, etc, providing them opportunities to tell a story about events that take place in their lives. 

Planning: Developing a systematic approach for setting and achieving goals.

Telling a story requires a plan. For younger children who cannot yet write, Toca Life World gives them the opportunity to orally tell a story by placing characters in an environment and then talking about what the characters are doing. This gives them some early practice in the importance of planning out a story. They can practice creating a story that has a beginning, middle, and end, either by themselves or with some guidance from an adult. Prompting children is also a good way to use Toca Life World to tell stories (“Tell me a story about this boy and girl at the doctor’s office…)