ACTIVITY CORNER

Melanie Plicher, quality and standards manager at the Alliance, shares ideas for exploring photography with children in your setting

“Photography is pretty simple stuff. You just react to what you see, and take many, many pictures….”
Elliot Erwitt

Digital cameras are easy for children to use, and images can be easily stored and shared. There is no need for expensive printing, making them more eco-friendly and images can also be cropped or resized, offering further learning opportunities as educators support children to discover the capabilities of technology.

Here are some ideas for exploring the theme in your setting…

Communication and language
If a picture paints a thousand words, then a photograph has huge potential. Even very young children who cannot use the camera themselves will delight in seeing a photo of something or somebody that they recognise. Building early language skills by looking at a familiar image together, initiates back and forth interactions where new vocabulary can be added.

Alternatively, you could take photographs and then make up a story together or take photographs to illustrate a favourite story or nursery rhyme. Incy Wincy Spider offers plenty of opportunities to photograph spiders and their webs – you could even discover what a waterspout is and help to illustrate an unfamiliar term.

Personal Social and Emotional Development
If children are prompted to take a photograph of something that makes them feel happy, they can begin to recognise and understand their feelings. It could be a particular colour, a friend or one of the early years team. This then opens discussion about why – for example – the colour yellow makes us feel happy or why their key person makes them smile. This can be built on by asking children to take a photograph of something they think that you or one of their friends would like. This helps to build empathy as children begin to recognise others’ feelings.

Physical development
Handling a digital camera with buttons, switches and dials helps children develop fine motor skills, balance and coordination. Children gain proficiency, control and confidence as they hold the camera steady or position themselves to get the image they want. Developing a lifelong interest in photography is good for physical and mental health too as children are motivated to explore their environment and search for something to capture digitally.

Literacy
Older children may enjoy photographing familiar advertising signs that they will name before they can read the words on them. Searching for different font styles and developing an understanding that the same letters can look different helps with recognition of the printed word in different formats.

Set children the challenge of taking a photograph for each letter in their name to help them learn to recognise letters and sounds. The resulting photographs make an interactive display that children can return to time after time as they look for similarities and explore letters and words.

Mathematics
Children can group items and photograph them as they begin to understand numbers. Create a tens frame outdoors using five sticks placed vertically with one placed across the middle of them horizontally.

Ask children to find leaves or pebbles that will fit within their tens frame, building up the numbers from one to 10.

Digital photography is also ideal for exploring distance. Zooming in closely on a subject gives a new perspective as children estimate its size and how far away it is. Zooming in on flowers or patterns on a butterfly’s wings helps children to spot symmetry and pattern in unexpected places.

Understanding the world
Being able to use a camera gives children a means by which they can explore the world around them. Recording changes in nature, such as how a tree changes throughout the seasons or recording the progress of a nearby building site, gives a timeline that can be revisited many times when captured in a series of photographs.

Children can sequence their photographs and will have plenty of opportunity to reflect on the changes they can see as they do. This activity can be extended with a visit to the local library to view archive pictures of the area they live in to show how it has changed over the years to give children a sense of past and present.

Expressive arts and design
American photographer Elliot Erwitt said: “Photography is an art of observation[…] It has little to do with the things you see and everything to do with you how you see them.” With this in mind, giving a child a camera to capture a moment in time that means something to them personally is really effective.