Stories, workshops and nursery rhymes told directly by their authors to children and teenagers forced to stay at home during the coronavirus emergency. They are the lessons on the sofa: a winning idea that has already taken the web by storm.
If you can't go to school, the lessons on the sofa come to you. Stories, nursery rhymes, home workshops and music or science lessons, designed for all the children and teenagers kept at home from school during this long week of health emergency. The idea came from Matteo Corradini and Andrea Valente, two authors of children's books and recipients of the Premio Andersen (the most prestigious award dedicated to writing for young people), who in record time put together the website Lezioni sul sofà, packed with creative ideas and a wealth of stories to watch, read and listen to.
Helping them in the endeavour, a small army of authors, artists and writers like themselves, who freely offered their art in the form of videos, tutorials and readings.
Among the many highlights is the stop-motion booktrailer for the book Calzarughe, bodyfanti e altri animali da salvare, in which Silvia Bonanni combines stories of endangered animals with a manual of creativity and recycling.
A simple and brilliant idea, which immediately met with enormous success. So much so that it registered such a volume of traffic that it temporarily crashed the site. The power of social word of mouth, which in the blink of an eye made its way around the Boot, landing on the "sofas" of tens of thousands of families.
It was launched by the authors themselves, through a simple post.
The offerings on the site, which include videos (uploaded to YouTube), audio, texts and drawings, are divided by type (readings, audio, lab, science) and by age (the age brackets range from 3+ to 14+). A little treasure trove of ideas and inspiration for travelling with the imagination, in which technology becomes an ally in a temporary emergency, already showing all its potential for the future.
Beyond the circumstances that sparked the idea, it is to be expected that lessons on the sofa will continue to be talked about even when things have returned to normal.
This is evidenced by the interest and trust that various organisations are already showing in the project. From parents of children forced to stay at home or in hospital for long periods, to the Milan public library system, which on its social channels has flagged and recommended lessons on the sofa to everyone.
And so, in a somewhat bold parallel, the mind turns to the Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio, in which the ten young protagonists spent their voluntary quarantine to escape the plague in Florence by doing precisely that — telling each other stories.
This small piece of news thus becomes a demonstration of how, even in an unforeseen and in some respects complicated situation such as the one we are living through, it is possible to draw positive experiences. Such as giving life to new ideas or projects, and slowing the pace, helping one another to rediscover the beauty of unhurried time — time to be filled with one's own imagination.
It is nothing new, in fact, that creativity can flourish precisely in moments of "boredom". A very rare commodity in these times when, from an early age, children are literally buried under commitments. A frenzy that can prove downright harmful to their neurological development, as psychologist and author Vittoria Maioli Sanese also explains. Preventing children from having to find their own ways to fill their free time can in fact undermine their autonomy and their ability to find solutions.
During these long days away from school desks and the anxiety of tests and oral exams, a good alternative to smartphones, television and video games could therefore be precisely a lesson on the sofa.
Provided that afterwards one also returns to banishing boredom with "real" books and plenty of games left entirely to be invented.