Wrenfield: Friends & Fall-outs

Stories where the words are yours.

A six-year-old shouts hello across the street to a friend, and the friend walks straight past. What happens next is usually decided in a few seconds, before anybody has thought about it. Wrenfield is a place to slow those seconds down, a long way from the playground and with nothing riding on it.

Wrenfield is an ordinary English village with the same six children in every story: Jonah, Dara, Omar, Nadia, Kit and Priya. There is a high street with a bakery, the rec, the school gate and the kitchens at home. Each story is short and stands on its own, and each is about the kind of trouble children really have with each other: who goes in goal, a rule that changes as soon as somebody starts losing, a name, a friend who did not turn round.

What your child does in each story

Every problem is worked through with the same questions, in the same order.

What happened? The facts first, before anyone decides what they meant.

How does someone feel, and what shows you? Your child looks at an illustrated face and the moment around it, chooses a feeling, and then points to the evidence rather than just guessing.

What do they want? Wanting something and doing it are two different steps, and the story takes them one at a time.

What could they say? Three choices, written the way children really talk. Your child picks one, and the story carries on from there.

The order of those questions follows a well-known account of how children make sense of a social situation, first set out by the psychologists Nicki Crick and Kenneth Dodge.

Consequences, not scores

There are no points, no stars and no ticks. When your child makes a choice, the story simply shows what that choice led to. Sometimes a good choice costs something, and the story is honest about that.

More than one choice can be right. Speaking up, asking, walking away, finding a friend and fetching a grown-up are each the right answer somewhere, because they are each the right answer somewhere in real life. Giving in is never presented as the answer.

And there are no villains. Each of the six children is the one who gets hurt in one story and the one who gets it wrong in another.

Read aloud, or read alone

Every story can be read aloud by a synthesised (computer-generated) narrator voice, and the line being read is marked on the page so a beginning reader can follow along. Any line can be heard again. In the grown-ups area you can choose words and voice, words only, or voice only.

Made for children aged 6 to 8, chosen by a grown-up

Twenty short stories, each finished in one sitting.

No advertising, and nothing to buy inside the app.

No accounts, no sign-in and no chat.

Works without an internet connection. The app is built without permission to use the internet, so nothing your child does in it leaves the device. What it remembers stays on the device.

No streaks, no daily rewards and no countdowns. When a story ends, nothing starts on its own: the next one waits until somebody chooses it.

A grown-ups area, behind a simple check, shows which stories have been played and lets you start them all again. For each finished story it shows the feeling your child picked, the choice they made and the ending they saw, with a question or two to talk about. It shows what they chose, not how well they did.

A story is meant to be a starting point. The conversation afterwards, about which way your child chose and why, is often the part that matters most.

Who makes it

Wrenfield is published by SANAD Technologies LLC under the BrightKidz name. If something in Wrenfield is wrong, or does not work for a real child, please write to hello@brightkidzhub.com. A person reads it.

Recent changes:

Version 1.1 adds your child's choices.

In the grown-ups area, behind the grown-ups check, each story your child finishes now has a short page:
- the feeling they picked and what they said showed it,
- the choice they made,
- the ending they saw, and
- a question or two to talk about together.

It shows what they chose, not how well they did.

Only the latest time through each story is kept, it stays on the device, and Reset clears it.