Every day, millions of adults across the country struggle with the physical and emotional effects of the pandemic – the fear, the uncertainty, the hardship, the loneliness and the heartbreaking losses.
Imagine how a child must feel.
A local author is making an effort to help parents, teachers and caregivers explain the crisis to our youngest family members, and help them cope with the anxiety.
Robert DeFinis says he first conceived of his new book,
How to Defeat the Icky, Filthy, Creepy, Slimy Corona Monster, to address, if not answer, his own small children’s concerns about what was happening all around them.
"Like many parents, the first few days of the pandemic presented a lot of questions,” says DeFinis, 40, who lives in Spring Mount but originally is from Lansdale. "Many couldn’t initially be answered because the situation was so fluid and there wasn’t much detail about what’s going to happen next. As an educator, I believe that you need to present information to children at their level, and if you can, make it engaging.”
DeFinis says he likes to consider children "superheroes in training,” and wanted to give them the tools to take positive action. So he put together an illustrated coloring book, with questions for discussion, that put the pandemic in terms they could grasp and supplied tactics they could adopt. "Once I finished the draft of the book, my two mini book critics at home told me they liked it,” says DeFinis. "That’s when I decided to make it public.”
The target age is 0 to 6, he says, with the words in rhyming stanza form for easier memorization. And he added the activity version of the book because, while washing your hands and covering when you cough and sneeze are widely understood conventions, social distancing "might be a new concept for kids,” he says. "This gives children the opportunity to color on the pages, while providing parents and teachers with guided questions at the bottom of each page.”
Since mid-April, he says, he says the ebook has been downloaded more than 7,000 times. "You never know what corner of the earth it’s going to reach,” DeFinis says. "I had one parent from South Africa share with me a video of her son explaining how he was going to defeat the 'Corona Monster.' And a teacher from Texas read it to her class on Zoom on World Book Day.”
He’s released
Corona Monster as an ebook, activity book and video book. All are available for free to teachers, via direct message at
www.drdefinis.com; "Teachers are looking for strong content in this subject area because of its newness and slight complexity for students at this age.” Others can purchase the ebook at
www.smashwords.com/books/view/1015010. A portion of all proceeds will be donated to organizations supporting families impacted by COVID-19. The Video Book is
free on YouTube.
"Educators and parents need to know that there are resources out there to support them during this time,” DeFinis says. "No one is in this alone.”
