Location: outdoor

Materials: your old digital camera or smartphone

Giving a child a camera to take pictures provides a really interesting window into their brain. You can see what interests them based on what they choose to capture in pictures.

You might not feel comfortable allowing your little ones to use your brand new smartphone, but you might have an old phone or digital camera lying around that you can use. The additional bonus to using an old one is that you can limit the number of other distractions on it by deleting old apps and disconnecting it from the internet.

Introduce the camera to children during morning meeting or another group conversation. Go over some rules on how to take care of it.

Invite children to take turns with it outside to take pictures of things that they see.

You can keep track of who is taking what pictures by taking a picture of the child before handing them the camera.

Later you can look through the pictures as a whole group or with individual children and see what conversations it sparks.

Possible Extensions:

• Print copies of the photos to create a class photography display
• Share the photos with parents in your daily communication or newsletter
• Print copies of the photos and invite children to cut them up and use them as part of a collage project
• For your preschool children, you can challenge them to take a specific number of photos
• Challenge your preschoolers to see if they can remember what photos they took with the camera