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Four years ago, on the day we inaugurated Donald J. Trump as president, I was wrapping up a speaking engagement for my book on how to use the science of emotion to energize the college classroom. One of the people waiting to chat with me was a physicist who said that, while he was receptive to my ideas about motivating students through emotional engagement, he was worried about just the opposite: too much emotional engagement in every sphere of our lives. Using physics principles to make his point, he argued that - by firing up supporters and detractors alike - Trump had elevated the emotional temperature of the entire country to a metaphorical tipping point where everything was, well, melting.

I have thought about his observation often in the intervening years, but no more so than in 2020, when I would log onto Twitter after a big news drop about the election or the pandemic - see the flames, the outrage, the end-days predictions - and log right back out. Yet my arguments about tending to the emotional climate of our classrooms have never centered on riling people up. Indeed, my research has focused on how to help students manage their anxiety, boredom, and frustration in order to home in on the goal of learning.

Right now, we could all do well to simmer down a bit, but that doesn't mean we ignore the role of emotion in our teaching. In fact, there is a way to pursue those aims and maximize student learning, and that is by introducing a sense of lighthearted play to our academic proceedings. Here's why:

Reason No. 1: Play is one of the most natural ways we learn. Across the animal kingdom, organisms play as a way to test possibilities, strengthen behavioral repertoires, and explore possible future scenarios. Pandas roll and tumble, crows slide down slippery slopes, dogs wrestle. Birds that play have larger brains and longer lives than those that don't. So much of play is bound up in uncertainty, in intentionally toying with having your movement restricted, your balance challenged, your status upended. It is how animals learn to cope with real-life uncertain times and threats.

Human beings exhibit those same traits and behaviors, but in more complex and abstract ways. When children play, they mime adult behaviors and experiment with social status, but they also test out potential scenarios and prepare for a loss of resources. Even in adults, you might consider our obsession with fictional stories - on the page or on screens - as playful, toying with multiple possible unfolding futures.

I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Kelly Leonard, executive director of learning and applied improvisation at the famed Second City, for a new book project. At any given time, he said, thousands of students are signed up to be trained in improvisation through Second City's professional-services arm - but very few of them intend on a career in the theater. They have realized, as he has through his long and storied career, that improv and other forms of play are not parlor tricks or mere warm-ups for acting but rather what he calls "human-being practice." How to listen, how to be vulnerable, how to make choices quickly on uncertain terrain, how to work as an ensemble rather than only as an individual - it's all part of being playful and learning to play together as a group.

Play is also one of the most cognitively demanding things we can do. It requires projecting yourself into the future, preparing for a range of possible scenarios, figuring out social partners' mental states, and adjusting on the fly to new information. In fact, more than a few voices - noting the decline of unstructured play in American childhood - have argued that this could have implications for children's mental health.

Play is an integral part of learning, and thus would be a useful tool for faculty members to employ in their classrooms at any time. But in the present moment, when so much about life feels uncertain and deadly serious, play may have special benefits.

Reason No. 2: Play offers mental breaks from dire news. Play may be particularly needed when the news and people's social-media feeds and daily conversations are so filled with danger and threat. Our bodies, and the nervous systems that operate them, are not designed to endure constant states of alarm.

Robert M. Sapolsky articulated that argument so well in his classic best-selling book, Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers. Human beings evolved to have two branches of our autonomic nervous system - one to kick us into gear when we need to flee from threats or fight to defend resources, and one to operate the rest of the time, digesting, repairing, and relaxing. The two work in contrasting and complementary ways to govern our responses to our environmental context. But your fight-or-flight system was designed to be a flexible and occasional response to a brief bout of intense activity - say, to flee from a lion - not to be on a constant, low-simmering burn of activity with frequent flare-ups every time you check the news.

Ordinarily I'm a huge fan of drawing connections between current events and classroom work as a way to draw meaning and engage student interest: Look, class, this information is not esoteric and limited to the confines of the laboratory or to dusty old scrolls! It has relevance! An entire literature on what is called " utility/value interventions " in the classroom demonstrates the usefulness of this approach for student learning and motivation.

But in 2020-21, I find myself reluctant to lean on that strategy overmuch - out of a personal weariness with the news and a reluctance to pour more stress on my students. A professor of psychology, I instead look forward each day to greeting my students and escaping with them to a world of brains and dream interpretation, considering topics like why both dogs and babies can be confused by balls that run under the couch and disappear.

I enter a state of flow when I'm teaching, and when I am able to play with ideas rather than portend doom, my work is that much more enjoyable. No doubt plenty of students are worn out by confronting all of the challenges of this unprecedented time and then logging onto Zoom or dragging their masked selves into a distanced classroom, only to be asked to confront those challenges some more as their professors rattle their sabers of doom. I hope that my pleasure invites students to share in the joy of intellectual discovery, and a large literature on the many ways that human emotions are contagious in the classroom suggests that this suspicion holds weight.

So how, exactly, do you "play" in the college classroom? More to the point, how do you do so in ways that are academically, emotionally, and pedagogically sound, as well as enjoyable for you and your students? Here are some strategies:

Use improv "warm-up" activities. The first rule of icebreakers is that everyone hates icebreakers. But a sea of unknown faces who might judge your every utterance - whether in a physical classroom or over Zoom - is not conducive to feeling as if you want to take intellectual risks. One of the most tried-and-true methods to jar us all out of this frozen social compliance is to loosen up our social joints - to play a little with those strangers and get to know them as actual people with quirky habits, fun nicknames, or interesting hobbies.

Faculty members can tap into a huge list of open-source icebreaker materials, thanks to the pedagogical experts Maha Bali, Autumm Caines, and Mia Zamora, who worked with OneHE and Equity Unbound to post this resource online. The list calls them "community building" or "warm-up" activities, which sounds so much better than "icebreaker."

Move it, move it. There is j oy in movement. It is no coincidence that a lot of improv activities involve movement - getting up and around, passing props, gesturing, acting out various roles. Movement gets the blood moving, the heart pumping, and raises arousal, which is good for memory, attention renewal, and focus.

I'm not suggesting you organize an in-class dance party. In the classroom this can be as simple as calling students to the whiteboard to contribute to a list, or to different corners of the room to brainstorm on poster boards. Here are some other options:

Use a snowball discussion technique. I have found it has great effects on the energy level in the room. I ask students to pair off with a neighbor and answer some discussion prompts (or their own self-generated discussion questions). Then the pair gets up together, crosses to another area of the classroom, and makes a foursome to share their diverse responses.

At Cult of Pedagogy, Jennifer Gonzalez has some wonderful slides supporting a few methods of building movement into class discussions, including one called This-or-That. It employs a You-Must-Choose frame that requires students to move to a side of the room to indicate their opinions on a topic. The existing slides have fun icebreaker questions, but I like to modify them to ask students to take stands on course-related issues.

A new book out this spring by Susan Hrach, Minding Bodies: How Physical Space, Sensation, and Movement Affect Learning, makes the case for the value of movement and offers many practical tips for using it in the college classroom.

On Zoom, of course, movement is tougher. But you could encourage everyone to take stretch breaks, get a drink, or find a scavenger-hunt item in their home.

Introduce a little levity. I ask students in my "Introduction to Psychology" course to grapple with complex issues, such as confirmation bias in media consumption, implicit racial bias, and controversies about new psychiatric diagnoses. But I also try to lighten things up - for example, I illustrate observational research methods with Alex Horowitz's study of how people in parks talk to their dogs ("You are so cute and so fluffy. And worth money! I could marry you."), and I ask students to test (and report back) on tried-and-true methods of inducing lucid dreams before they go to bed at night.

I am in the middle of a qualitative research study in which my honors student and I are interviewing college students about their best and worst learning experiences in college. We're still in the data-collection and data-analysis phase, but I can tell you that students are motivated by professors who use humor, who bring their own fascination with the content to the fore, and who find ways to introduce a sense of playful intellectual exploration to the classroom.

Be creative, yet careful, when you tie in to current events. Connecting course content to some news event is a proven way to heighten student interest in the class. And you would be doing students an intellectual disservice to avoid talking about the 2020 presidential election in a political-science class, or about the Black Lives Matter protests following the killing of George Floyd in a sociology course. But there are ways to introduce and grapple with highly charged topics without awkwardly putting marginalized undergraduates in the spotlight or encouraging high levels of tension between students with opposing political views.

For instance, in a unit on media literacy and disinformation in my intro-psychology course, I talk about the "four moves" paradigm (a four-step process to check the reliability of online information). Rather than start with a potentially heated, controversial topic, I first ask students to use the four moves to test whether or not it is true that zoos employ people whose entire job is to prop upright penguins that have tipped over watching planes pass overhead. Once students have mastered the moves, we turn to more serious examples of disinformation and their devastating effects. The idea is to balance light and dark, and to respect the strong reactions that some students may have to particular topics.

Interrupt the routine. Play involves uncertainty, but it is a friendly sort of uncertainty that invites curiosity. While it is good to have a regular rhythm in your course, occasionally interrupting the routine may be playful and energizing. It may also renew students' waning attention.

Try "ungrading," or at least low-stakes grading. It is pretty hard for students to feel a sense of intellectual levity if they are terrified that their entire grade in your course hinges on a few high-stakes exams. In that scenario, they are most likely to work hard to feed you verbatim exactly what you fed them, deadening creativity and learning alike.

So mix it up. Create many different, low-stakes opportunities for students to demonstrate their understanding of the material and their creative grappling with the content, rather than focusing on a few big tests. Or try your hand at " ungrading," one of many out-of-the-box methods that faculty members have developed in recent years to reform how we evaluate students' work.

Know when to take a break. Once in a while in class, drop everything. In graduate school I taught a few courses as a visiting instructor. Everything had been going swimmingly, but one afternoon I showed up to my usually reliable classroom and couldn't get the LCD projector to work. My entire lecture and associated activities were all on slides, and I was still enough of a rookie teacher to find the idea of going off-script somewhat terrifying.

It was at that three-quarter point of the semester when everyone was overloaded and strung tight, and it was also one of those New England early-spring days when the sun warms up and the breeze is light and you get the sudden sense that winter is about to break and all the promises of spring and summer are about to unfurl. I told them about the projector and called off class. I have never felt emotional contagion more tangibly than in that moment - a wave of excitement, gratitude, and relief spread throughout the room with such force I rocked back on my heels. People clapped, shouted.

Occasionally give your students a break. Give yourself a break. Breaks are important.

The acting coach Keith Johnstone writes, "most teachers are afraid to give 'I am playing' signals to their students. If they would, their work would become a constant pleasure." Play is intellectually rigorous. But it can also bring joy to the classroom. In this moment of multiple elongated crises, I believe that we need all the joy we can get.

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Advice | How to Play in the College Classroom in a Pandemic, and Why You Should

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Four years ago, on the day we inaugurated Donald J. Trump as president, I was wrapping up a speaking engagement for my book on how to use the science of emotion to energize the college classroom.

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Share key takeaways from the read! Add thoughts below any of the questions to the right... 

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Share key takeaways from the read! Add thoughts below any of the questions to the right... 

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Session Idea: Use Zoom whiteboard for a pictionary game - could be one focused on anatomy or other course-content -related topic

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Session Idea: Use Zoom whiteboard for a pictionary game - could be one focused on anatomy or other course-content -related topic

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How to Virtually Play Pictionary using the Zoom Whiteboard

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Session idea: Virtual Spaces with Oyyay.co

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Session idea: Virtual Spaces with Oyyay.co

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Contact Jenn Mackey for how she uses this tool!

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Break out of the grid

With ohyay studio, creators can build interactive, infinitely configurable virtual spaces and share them with their friends and customers. The possibilities are endless, so get started today and surprise us!

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With ohyay studio, creators can build interactive, infinitely configurable virtual spaces and share them with their friends and customers. The possibilities are endless, so get started today and surprise us!

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We all dreamed of going on the show and playing the Jeopardy game but now you actually can, sitting comfortably at home using Jeopardy Labs! You can finally play Jeopardy on Zoom with your friends and find out how you would fare if you were on the game.

What is Jeopardy Labs and how to use it

Jeopardy Labs is created by Jeopardy to allow players all over the world to enjoy this fun game. The Labs have a lifetime membership for just $20. This unlocks the ability to add images to your game, embed videos, manage your templates, and more.

However, you do not need a membership to use Jeopardy Labs. The game offers users the option to create their own game, questions and all, or simply use a game template from their archive, all for free.

To select a Jeopardy game template, click 'Find a Jeopardy Game', and use the search bar to narrow your search by topics.

► 50+ Best Zoom games to play with friends

Once you have decided on a topic in Jeopardy Labs, you need a way to show everyone on the Zoom meeting the questions being asked. For that, we will be using Zoom's Share screen feature. Only the host is required to share their screen.

To share your screen during a Zoom meeting, first hover over the video feed, then click the 'Share screen' button that appears on the bottom panel.

Here, choose the browser in which the Jeopardy Labs game has been launched. Make sure you tick the 'Share computer sound' box at the bottom, to enable other players to hear the game noises.

That's it! Now everyone on the call can view the game through your screen!

► Best Zoom games for Kids to play online

How to play Jeopardy on a Zoom meeting

What do you need

Follow this guide to play a fun game of Jeopardy over a Zoom meeting. Here is what you need to play the game:

Host: A PC to share the screen over a Zoom meeting and manage the game

Participants: A PC or a mobile device to join the Zoom meeting and play the game

Prepare the game

Assuming you are the host, first start your Zoom meeting and invite all the players. The players must form equally distributed teams and appoint one person as the team leader in each team.

Go to the Jeopardy Labs website and select the subject you would like to play. Input the number of teams that will be playing the game and hit the 'Start' button.

On your Zoom application, use the above guide to share your screen with the players. Before you start the game, you must choose any category and amount as the 'Daily double'. Do not let any of the players know which one is chosen. We will explain what the Daily double is, later on in the game.

Play the game

As the host, ask Team 1 to choose a category and a prize amount. For example, 'Children' for '300'. Click on the respective category to pull up the question.

Once the question has been read, the team leaders may call out if they think they know the answer. The remainder of the team must privately message the team leader, what they think the answer is.

The first team to ring in must answer the question in the form of a question. For example, if the question on the board is 'a baby's favorite drink?', the answer given can be 'What is milk?'

If Team 1 answers the question correctly they get the corresponding points (in this case 300). To view the correct answer, press the space bar on your keyboard (only host). To award points, click the + next to the team's name.

The game will automatically award the points corresponding to the question. The team that answers currently gets to choose the next question and amount value.

If Team 1 answers incorrectly, they will be deducted the corresponding points from their total. The question now passes to Team 2. Team 2 can either choose to answer it or pass it on to Team 3. No points are deducted for passing the question. However, if they answer wrong, the corresponding points will be deducted.

The round ends when the question has been answered or passed to each team once. If the round ends and no one has answered the question, the team that answered the question correctly last gets to start the next round.

Now, if a team chooses the 'Daily double' question, only that team can answer the question. i.e. the question cannot be passed. Additionally, the team can decide how much they would like to wager on that question (the amount must be less than their total and multiples of the question value).

For example, if the Daily Double question is 'Sweet' for '200', the team that chose the question, can wager 200 or multiples of 200 (400, 600, 800, etc.), but only within the number of points they have.

So, if they have 500 points, they can only wager up to 400. If they answer the question correctly, they win the 400; if not, 400 gets deducted from their points.

Alternative websites

While Jeopardy Labs is the official game website, there are a number of other sites that host similar gameplay. Listed below are some of our favorites.

Factile allows users to create their own Jeopardy-style quizzes. You can add categories, assign values, and much more. They also offer four different styles of playing the game.

Sporcle is a quiz website with hundreds of quizzes to choose from. They also have a dedicated section for Jeopardy questions.

Of course, you could always play the official mobile game. You could play against your friends by adding them to your contacts from within the game.

Jeopardy is the fun trivia game show that dates back to the 1960s! The game involves six categories having five questions each. Each question has a value attached to it. The higher the value, the more difficult is the question, but also higher is the reward. The final twist, is that all answers must be given in the form of questions!

If you enjoy playing trivia games, you should also check out our article on trivia games to play over a Zoom meeting!

► 14 Trivia games to play on Zoom [May 2020]

You can also play some team games on Zoom if that's what your large group of friends and family will like, and we have got a bunch of great Zoom meeting ideas for office, too. Be sure to check out these links for more fun over Zoom.

That's not all, as the weekend approaches, you might as well plan some drinking games over Zoom to play this time around. If Zoom is not your thing, there are a bunch of Houseparty games you can try (works on a computer too), or simply some of the best games online during quarantine listed here.

For those from whom, playing games isn't the most fun way to kill the time, you can opt to watch HBO movies together or Netflix on Zoom itself.

Let us know how do you plan to spend with the power of apps like Zoom at your disposal.

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We all dreamed of going on the show and playing the Jeopardy game but now you actually can, sitting comfortably at home using Jeopardy Labs! You can finally play Jeopardy on Zoom with your friends and find out how you would fare if you were on the game.

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incorporate music and dance breaks in your Zoom sessions

Zoom treasure & scavenger hunts! Students run to get items and then "show and tell"

Zoom Karaoke?

Meditation breaks with Tibetan bowls and other sounds on YouTube...

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It's 10 a.m. and my 4-year-old races to the computer on our coffee table.

"Is it time for my music class, mama?" she asks hopefully.

"It is," I say, smiling through the knot that has been tied in my stomach since last week when it started to become shockingly clear that nothing in our lives - in anyone's lives - was going to be the same again for a long time.

I load up the computer, click on a link to YouTube live and enter "the Hootenanny," a virtual music and movement class led by Lauren O'Brien and Matt Commerce, two entertainers with a small son, who this week launched a streaming lifeline for the nearly 80 families who have participated daily.

Songs about washing your hands, spending lots of time at home and going for long walks are part of the programming, which the couple are writing each day based on the new reality as dictated by the coronavirus outbreak.

Participants type in their child's name as they join the group, and O'Brien starts class by saying hello to each kid personally, listing where they are watching from: Arya in Westchester, Idella in midcity L.A., Murray in Burbank, Gabe from Raleigh, N.C., and more.

My daughter's face lights up with pure joy when her name is read, and tears spring to my eyes. With preschool, play dates and dance classes canceled, "the Hootenanny" has become the one constant in our lives - a neededdailyroutine in a world that feels suddenly rudderless.

When our social activities are limited to waving at folks walking down our street, the show is a way for us to feel connected to other kids and parents. And we're far from alone. Almost overnight, virtual gatherings of all kinds are cropping up across the internet, aided by easy-to-use technology like Google Hangouts, Zoom, YouTube, Instagram, WhatsApp, Netflix Party and Facebook Watch Parties.

Lives we once lived out in the world are now being streamed among friends, families and communities longing for connection. People are telecommuting to therapists and taking yoga and cardio classes online, striving to stay healthy in a world that feels anything but. Birthday parties, brunches, play dates and poker nights - as well as dance, art, language, math and reading classes - are all being held virtually. So are deeply intimate interactions such as funerals and Facetime dates between hospital workers and the families they find themselves quarantined from.

Here's a roundup of stories from some of the most interesting virtual gatherings we have found in these still-early days of a growing crisis.

Book club chats

Los Angeles-based TV writer Erica Rosbe has participated in a virtual book club with friends from New York University for more than a decade. But when social distancing and quarantines because of coronavirus became a daunting reality, the group got serious quickly.

"We did an impromptu Google Hang on Monday night when everything was feeling particularly dire," she said of her group, "Nerdy Girls." The women are around the world, including in New Zealand, Wisconsin, Ireland, Florida and New York, and Rosbe says it's illuminating to realize how every country and town is on its own coronavirus timeline, with some areas less affected than others.

From now on the group will meet via Google Hangouts more frequently than before. Currently the group isreading "Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger" by Rebecca Traister. Not on the reading list: "Station Eleven," the 2014 novel by Emily St. John Mandel about a flu pandemic that decimates much of the world's population. Rosbe picked that years ago.

Distance dinner parties

Andreas Faisst loves to socialize, so when self-isolation measures meant he couldn't go to dinner with friends, he switched to a virtual get-together. Faisst, a scientist at the Caltech Infrared Processing and Analysis Center in Pasadena, and his girlfriend, Jennifer Tan, who also works at Caltech, had made dinner plans with four friends for Monday. Instead of getting together in person, they rendezvoused in front of their respective laptop screens.

Faisst created a personal account on the Zoom videoconferencing platform, which he knows from using it at work, and sent invitations for everyone to meet at 7 p.m. People dialed in while they were cooking - Faisst and Tan made udon noodles with mushrooms and peas, one friend had pizza delivered, and others made pasta. The connection wasn't perfect - the video window isn't big, which made it hard to see what the other guests were doing. Still, everyone had fun. "We ended up talking more than we would otherwise," Faisst said. "We caught up on what's happening. There was less moving around and more focused discussion, which was different but very good."

So good, that he's already planning to invite the five to seven coworkers he normally eats lunch with in the Caltech cafeteria to meet for virtual lunches. "That's a hard thing I miss the most," he said. "My prediction is that I will talk to my friends much more than if I was at work."

Virtual seders

Actor and writer Ashley Bank O'Leary, hasn't seen her father or stepmother inmore than a week. Her stepmother is immunocompromised, so she doesn't expect the situation to change soon. Extremely social by nature, O'Leary and her husband, who live in L.A., have started text chains for regular check-ins with family members and friends. It was during a family group-texting session that her stepmom suggested setting up a virtual seder. The plan is for relatives - throughout California - to set up Zoom on their laptops and to place those laptops in their dining rooms. O'Leary's stepmom, in Los Angeles, will likely distribute an ingredient list and a family member, yet to be nominated, will lead the proceedings.

The best part? The virtual nature of the gathering allows family members from around the country - who wouldn't have been able to travel to L.A. for the originally scheduled event - to participate.

Ice-skating watch parties

Last yearformer figure skater Janet Tscha began hosting a virtual ice-skating watch party called "Skating Lesson" via a new interactive, live-events platform called CYA Live. Her watch parties were rolling along nicely until coronavirus began its global rampage and the 2020 World Figure Skating Championships, scheduled to be held in Montreal this month, were canceled. Overnight her group more than doubled from 40 to more than 100, as disappointed skating fans gathered to watch, comment and commiserate on old championship videos together.

"The loss of sports is huge," Tscha says, adding that "Skating Lesson" has upped its watch parties from one to three a week to fill the gaping void left by canceled games and competitions.

Meditation moves online

Shawnta Valdes isn't big on technology. She just joined Instagram this week. So when the New York transplant was told that she needed to teach her daily meditation class virtually via Zoom, she immediately thought, "This isn't going to work." Valdes is the director of member engagement at the Jane Club, a shared workspace for women and working moms in Los Angeles, and every day for the past two years she has guided her community of professional moms through daily awareness-based group meditation.

When all programs at the Jane Club, including child circle time, and teach-ins, went virtual practically overnight, Valdes linked to Zoom on her computer and found herself face to face with her most consistent student, sitting in her living room. Twenty-two women joined that morning - more than Valdes normally has in a regular class. They checked in with their breath and focused their attention on various parts of their bodies with Valdes' soothing voice as their guide.

"This is a beautiful way for us to connect," Valdes says. "And I have to say, much to my own surprise, the connection is just as deep, as real, and as effective."

Virtual recovery

A San Francisco-based woman who works in marketing and social media says she was heartened to discover the speed with which Alcohol Anonymous began hosting virtual meetings. She says the movement began in earnest last week in New York where the number of participants crashed Zoom's free application.

The woman now hosts a small virtual 12-step meeting with other moms she knows online, just to check in each day to see how everyone is doing with this unprecedented pressure.

"It's been a really pivotal moment in my sobriety," says the woman, who asked that her name be withheld for privacy. "It's interesting to see how the fellowship adapts and changes based on the needs of the community."

Karaoke meetups

Bars and restaurants across the country may be closed. But that's not stopping Alex Zaragoza from engaging in one of her favorite pastimes: karaoke. The senior staff writer for Vice gathered her friends recently for a virtual karaoke night on Google Hangouts, where they belted out the lyrics to Linkin Park's hit "In the End" among other jams.

Before the coronavirus outbreak, the Brooklyn resident and her friends would stop by Beats Karaoke Cafe, a small karaoke spot with private rooms she's frequented since 2018. "It's our notorious hangout spot. We've seen many nights of drunk singing and debauchery and birthday celebrations there," she said by phone.

But "exasperated by cabin fever and a deep desire to belt out 'Torn' by Natalie Imbruglia," Zaragoza writes at Vice, she decided to find another way to keep the singing going. "New York is such a packed city and you're always surrounded by people ... so being in self-isolation and social-distancing in a city that is so social and surrounded by people, it's been really hard," she said. "Many of my friends work in media so we're always stressed out, and we really try to take time to check in on each other, and karaoke is a way we check in and release stress because it's just super fun." They had such a blast that Zaragoza hopes it becomes a weekly or biweekly activity.

Micheltorena Street Elementary School in Silver Lake is closed, but some room parents are doing their best to make sure the kids don't feel too disconnected from their friends. Lianna Colaso, who has two children at the school - one in kindergarten and another in third grade - helped gather 20 kindergartners together for a virtual playdate via Zoom on Wednesday. It's a meetup she hopes to continue twice a week for as long as school shutdowns last.

Was it Zoom chaos? Colaso laughs.

"It's so funny because they just don't say anything," she says. "They just say, 'hi,' 'hi, 'hi.' "

That will change, she speculates, as they get used to this new way of doing things.

Game Nights

When Lisa Leeman found out a friend's 65 th birthday party was canceled because of the outbreak, she pulled together a virtual party to replace it. About 10 people logged in via Zoom over the course of Saturday night. The same group regularly gets together to play bridge and other games, so it wasn't a surprise when someone suggested playing 20 questions. Leeman used Zoom's chat room feature to keep track of the questions. "We did round robins of questions, that was fun," she said.

Leeman, a documentary filmmaker and professorat USC's School of Cinematic Arts, plans to use Zoom once classes resume after spring break. She's experimenting in non-work settings as practice. Her first virtual dinner party was with two friends last week. Next she wants to try a virtual movie screening.

Doing things online is a great antidote to not being able to go out, Leeman said. "I'm trying to find that balance," she said. "I want to have virtual coffees or cocktail hour. I'm going to get creative about it, because what else can we do?"

Virtual letters

It's better known as email, and you can use it to write long, thoughtful letters to friends and family members who are not tech savvy or who might be feeling overwhelmed by the sudden ubiquity of screen time in their lives. My father, Joseph Gelt, is one such person. Addicted to books and proudly without a cellphone, my father is turning 75 next week. "I know that we won't be able to visit," I told him the other day, "But I promise we can FaceTime."

"Please, not that," he replied, joking, but not. His gift this year - the greatest gift I could possibly give him - will be an old-fashioned letter, filled with thoughts about our new lives, observations about my day and anecdotes about his granddaughter.

I'll have my mom print it out and put it in a real envelope, so he can open it and savor it like it arrived via snail mail but without the need to sanitize after reading.
Correspondent Michelle V. Rafter and Times staff writer Dorany Pineda contributed to this report.

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Book chats, karaoke, long-distance seders: 10 ways to connect virtually with family and friends

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It's 10 a.m. and my 4-year-old races to the computer on our coffee table. "Is it time for my music class, mama?" she asks hopefully. "It is," I say, smiling through the knot that has been tied in my stomach since last week when it started to become shockingly clear that nothing in our lives - in anyone's lives - was going to be the same again for a long time.