Kids, parents and teachers get creative while stuck at home

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Kids, parents and teachers get creative while stuck at home

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Left: An illustration by Eleanore Lubbers (ellielubbers.com) of her home in Seoul that she finished while staying indoors to practice social distancing last week. [ELEANORE LUBBERS]

As the school break due to the coronavirus outbreak continues, it has become a habit for some parents with young children to check out social media at the start of each day.

“This is what I did today with my son,” Park Eun-jin, from North Gyeongsang, posted on her Instagram on March 18.

Park shared a photo of an arts and crafts activity she did with her child involving a piece of paper, the bottom ends of paper cups and a watercolor painting. In the end, the project resembled the house being carried by balloons from the Pixar movie “Up” (2009).

She ended her post with #anyplaychallenge, a reimagining of the popular song and TikTok challenge created by rapper Zico that went viral online in January.

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Right: A craft to do at home with young children posted on Instagram by @iameunjining on March 18. [PARK EUN-JIN]

“This is brilliant,” someone commented on the post on Tuesday. “Now I know just what to do with my kids tomorrow!”

“I have been cooped at home with my kids all day,” another person wrote in response to Park’s post. “Thank you so much for the idea, we’ll be trying it at home.”

A search for #anyplaychallenge on Instagram yields nearly 30,000 posts by parents sharing their ideas for activities to do at home with young children, many of them involving arts and crafts or baking.

One parent went as far as to build a whack-a-mole out of Styrofoam, a box and a pair of wooden chopsticks, while another simply stacked paper cups in the living room for their son to run into, just for fun.

Due to the coronavirus outbreak, schools have remained closed past their standard winter break, which usually runs from January to the beginning of March in Korea. The first day of school has been pushed back from early March to April 6.

The delay has impacted not only students and their parents, but also teachers, including foreign language teachers from abroad.

“The Covid-19 coronavirus has slowly impacted my life here,” Eleanore Lubbers, 26-year-old illustrator and English teacher from Michigan, told the Korea JoongAng Daily on Thursday. “It slowed down my social life, making it harder to grab a coffee or dinner […] Then the school delays began, my church started holding digital services, and I stopped ordering takeout, spending much of my time in my apartment, cooking and connecting socially via the internet.”

Like the parents looking for crafty ideas online, Lubbers has also gotten creative during her downtime. She was finally able to finish an illustration of the inside of her apartment that she had been working on for a year.

“I wanted to document my first apartment in Korea with all its quirks,” she said. “The perspective is a flattened one, where I ‘unwrapped’ the one-room apartment into a 6-by-30-inch illustration. It’s chock-full of details, from the Korean Olympics ticket on the fridge to the wayward popcorn on the floor.”

BY ESTHER CHUNG [chung.juhee@joongang.co.kr]

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