Picture this...

you have a class of kids for an hour and a half at the most and you have one camera booked out to your art studio and have managed to beg and borrow three or four more from other class rooms, some of them have full memory cards and you don't know what you can delete...some of them have flat batteries and you're trying to get every kid to take photos in the time you have the class. On top of that what do you do with the kids who have nothing to do while they wait for a camera. How do you supervise both groups, because there are some pretty keen kids waiting to get their hands on a camera and this distracts them from whatever it is that you've told them to do while they wait.

I went to our P&C with a request for some money to buy a class set of cameras - the lovely generous P&C donated some money so I could buy the cameras to teach the kids photography properly. When I went to Office Works tho buy the cameras the manager was impressed with my desire to teach photography and our plans for a photographic exhibition later in the year she said they like to help out schools when they can so she donated a camera too. We now have 12 cameras for the kids to use and one for me to use to demonstrate and record what the kids are doing.

It is my aim that all the kids from year one to seven will get a turn at using these cameras throughout the year.

Today the year 4/5's in room 19 had their first chance to have a go. This first lesson was mostly about how to hold and care for the camera and little things like - 

Make sure you start your photographic session by holding a card with your name and room number and taking a photo of it before you start taking pictures. That way I can download your photos and get them into the right folder on our main computer storage system.

I didn't give the children any instruction beyond "take pictures of things that you find interesting." 

I purposely haven't given them any photography tips yet because the next part of the lesson will be to look at the pictures we have taken and choose the ones we like most and discuss what it is that makes these photos work. 

Here are some of my favourites from today.