A Social Distancing Tale

When the quarantine began back in March and the how-to’s of Distance Learning were being considered (invented?) I admit, I struggled to get on board. How would I take a hands-on play based preschool program like mine and do it virtually? Sure, we can hop onto a class video call and recite letter sounds and memorize our not-super-important-right-now symbols, but that is just a tiny tiny tiny part of what happens inside my classroom anyway and I just couldn’t wrap my head around the idea of (productively) instructing 48 preschoolers through Zoom or sending out prerecorded circle time videos.

SO. I didn’t.

I knew I needed to figure out something, but I immediately felt the overwhelm of the work that teachers, parents, and students would face in the coming weeks and understood that time and resources were probably going to be pretty limited. I didn’t want to add stress to already busy schedules and maxed mental bandwidths, and I wanted to put whatever time and energy I’d have to give into something meaningful and truly helpful for my students. With so much abrupt and BIG change happening in their little worlds and in the big wide world, I wanted to provide a way for them to engage in some kind of storytelling, something to help us to relate to one another and stay connected, a resource for processing their experiences of quarantine and social distancing in real time.

SO.

I put together blank books for each of my students and for the last several weeks we have been sharing our social distancing stories together on Zoom and Marco Polo, and illustrating our own individual books at home. It has been such an awesome experience and I’m stoked to share some of our illustrations here with you!

If you’d like to do this activity with your kids at home (even though some restriction are lifting it’s never too late to tell your story!) you can download our book cover page HERE. I happened to have a bunch of blank books on hand, that I’d purchased from Target last fall, so that’s what we used (see pictures below) but, homemade blank books are easy to make with a simple stack of plain white paper and a stapler!

Side note* These blank books from Target ARE THE BEST. If you are lucky you’ll find them in the dollar spot in August (8ct package for $5). But you’ll have to beat me to the chase, because when I find them in stock I BUY ALL OF THEM. Haha!

Enjoy!