Corona Chronicles: Children Researching Their Everyday Lives, Education and Relationships During the Coronavirus Pandemic: Digitally Animated Videos and Activity Sheets for Creative, Socially Distanced and Remote, Inclusive Data Generation With Children, 2020-2021

A set of seven digital animations created by and for children, first introducing the project and then one for each activity during Phase One (English school holidays - July-August 2020). These combine stop-start animation, cartoons, line drawings, collage and photographs to visually communicate the project as well as illustrating the variety of creative possibilities. There are six weeks of activities, each with a theme and an associated activity sheet with creative resources which provided a digital and printable text to prompt, stimulate and encourage children’s reflections.As the UK moved into lockdown in March 2020 and schools closed for almost all children, we began developing our ‘Corona Chronicles’ research with children. The research was designed to support children to visually chronicle life during the coronavirus pandemic and what supports their wellbeing. We developed a creative approach to meet the specific challenges of carrying out research with children during a time when the pandemic measures meant face-to-face research was not possible. A set of seven digital animations were created by and for children, first introducing the project and then one for each activity during Phase One (English school holidays - July-August 2020). These combine stop-start animation, cartoons, line drawings, collage and photographs to visually communicate the project as well as illustrating the variety of creative possibilities and the encouragement to work with 'any combination of these’. There were six weeks of activity in this first phase of the project, each with a theme and an associated activity sheet with creative resources which provided a digital and printable text to prompt, stimulate and encourage children’s reflections. The six themes were developed from research by the Children’s Society Ways to wellbeing: Exploring the links between children’s activities & subjective wellbeing (2014) which have been adapted to help children to reflect on their experiences during the pandemic. The activity sheets and videos are freely available to anyone interested in supporting and/or researching with children during the pandemic.