Photography Crafts for Kids

Originally published 2/25/2011 at explorealongtheway.com
In yesterday’s blog, “Nature and Kids – Been There, Seen That?” I suggested that parents and their children or preteens go out to one spot in nature each day and notice how it was different from the previous day. An easy place to visit may be a tree in your backyard, although you could visit a pond or vernal pool, a garden (even if it gets covered in snow), or any place that you will be able to go to the majority of the year’s days.

Older kids and preteens may find this activity more interesting if they take a photograph each day. However, they shouldn’t just snap a picture from the same angle each day. First, they should look at their tree questing for something different. Today they see a caterpillar and take its picture.

These photographs could become part of a nature observation blog. Maybe the blog consists of the photograph and fewer than ten words each day and only grandma who lives across the country reads this blog.

Maybe a month or a season of photographs gets put into a slide show, combined with music, and go onto YouTube. Maybe the images become the screen saver on the family computer – another photograph gets added each day – and you end up watching the year scroll by.

A crafty child may create a scrapbook combining photographs with pressed leaves or smudges of dirt or sand smeared across the paper. Print out the pictures to make a collage for each season. The pictures don’t all have to be the same size. Older children and preteens who know how to insert and manipulate the placement of pictures on the computer could connect the images from a month onto a single-page document. At the end of the year, you have a book.

You don’t have to start this project on January 1st. Start this in the spring so you can watch nature expand toward summer and then quiet itself for the winter. You may have more time in the summer to make this a regular activity. A teacher may begin this in the fall and go throughout the school year – will her students want to go to the schoolyard in the summer so that they can see how nature presents itself during this season?

The key here isn’t what you do with your observations; your goal is to start noticing what is happening outside your front door.