Give your kids a photo quest and the old snap and shoot digital camera, or your old phone, and see what they come up with!
In this digital age 10 photos to get someone’s head on right, or 30 blurry shots to get one good one is no big deal. Even better, seeing what kids come up with with a camera is often seeing the world in a whole different way.
First of all, make sure they know how to use the camera or device they are using, and if it’s your actual phone, turn off msg notifications etc. Nothing like a twitter message of inappropriate language popping up!
Using a real camera might be a new experience, though most kids can use an iphone camera it seems. Buttons need to be found and pushed, and even just holding it right is something they need to learn.
Kids cameras are cheap now, but so are small point and shoot digitals. If they like this activity, consider getting them an inexpensive one of their own.
So they’ve worked out the camera.
Rather than pointing them outside and seeing what happens, create a quest, or a challenge to focus them, so to speak.
Send them outside with a half hour to take pics of as many white things as they can find, or things starting with L, or for older kids perhaps give them an idea to capture like “winter” or “small”, or find one thing each for the letters of their name. You can ask for a task from them and do the activity too.
If you feel like a bigger task, especially for older kids and one you have to take part in, go out the day before and take a whole lot of macro-close up shots of things outside. Print out the pics and have them them on display outside. They have to find and take a bigger pic of what they think it might be.
After, upload their pics to the laptop, or even better, use whatever amazing digital age ways you can to get them on the TV. Give them an album on your facebook page, or print them out and make something great for Nana. They’ll be pretty excited to see their photos on a bigger screen.
They’ll be interpreting the world in their own way, using all sorts of fine motor and cognitive skills and learning a little about photography. And they’ll BE OUTSIDE!
