Coronials

 

This pandemic that hit the world about a year ago has changed everybody's lives. Within a year we got used to wearing face masks,  work from home, homeschool children, appreciate toilet paper at home, queue for stores, missing out on all parties and gatherings, ...

Also for children the impact must be enormous.  All of a sudden their parents told them they couldn't go to school anymore, all of a sudden people and their teachers were masked , ... They hear conversations about people in hospitals etc.   It must be hard to grasb and sometimes as a parent it is difficult to understand what is going on in their little heads. 

Now you can by the game Coronials in Dreamland or Colruyt. It has been developed by Mobile School. The base of the game is educational material developed for the mobile schools that are used in 40 countries to reach out to street children. Since also Belgian children are impacted, they've also turned it into a cardboard game.

You can play it at 3 levels of difficulty

- the easy game is a pile of cards with a small detail that you need to search in a race against the clock on the big cardboard game that is full of cool details of Corona related situations around the world.  If you are the fastest, you get the card and you need to collect as much as possible. Each time there is also a question to answer which allows  you to discuss the situation (in the amount of depth that you wish and the children are capable off, it can be done at so many different levels).  There is also cardboard actions like skipping turns, taking extra cards etc etc

- The extra level you need to collect cards of a specific type and you must play a bit more tactical

- there is also a storytelling level that you can play. 

The children enjoyed playing but I think elementary school age is optimal for the game (although my pre-schooler really had fun searching images). The images are incredibly rich and fun to discover all the elements that have been hidden.  They give ample opportunity to discover and talk about the good things and confusing, scary, weird things that are happening in this corona time. 

Buying the game is also a good action as it raises funds for Mobile School who was also forced to review all their activities and outreach last year and this year. So to all readers with young children, I can recommend this game!