For Parents
Mood & emotional insights
Follow how your child is feeling over time, understand mood alerts, and track emotional comprehension.
PEN Play looks after more than schoolwork. As your child plays, the game gently captures how they're feeling, giving you insight into their emotional wellbeing.
The Mood Meter
Feelings are grouped into four colour quadrants (the Mood Meter): red, yellow, green and blue. Together these describe both how pleasant a feeling is and how much energy it carries.
Open your child's mood insights (from their profile) to see how their mood has trended over time and which feelings come up most often.
Mood alerts
If a pattern appears that may be worth your attention, PEN Play raises a mood alert. Alerts can flag things like:
- A sustained low mood over several days.
- A sustained high-energy negative mood.
- A noticeable drop in how a child is feeling.
- A stretch with no mood data at all.
Alerts appear on your portal home's attention strip and on the child's mood page.
A mood alert is a prompt to check in with your child, not a diagnosis. You know your child best - use it as a conversation starter.
Emotional comprehension
PEN Play also helps children learn to recognise and understand emotions. The emotional comprehension section on your child's profile shows how well they're identifying feelings over time - a valuable skill that supports empathy and self-awareness.
Where to find it
Everything above lives on your child's profile:
- Mood insights and mood alerts - the child's mood page.
- Emotional comprehension - the child's comprehension page.
For the full picture of skills alongside feelings, see Understanding your child's progress.