Using Photography in Your Homeschool

Bugs are really popular at my house right now...but thankfully they're the digital image kind, not the real creepy-crawlies under the sink! My two youngest kids spend their afternoon hunting little creatures and bringing photographic trophies into the house.

My husband is a photojournalist, so practically every room in our house has its own camera! Two of my sons are shutterbugs, and even our seven-year-old daughter has a small, inexpensive little digital camera. We use these in our school for art, but also for enhancing science, geography and history lessons.

Film cameras are nice, but developing gets very expensive very quickly. Digital cameras allow children to take many, many pictures and to experiment with various settings on their cameras and treatments on their photos. A really good free photo program that allows anyone to upload digital pictures and crop, change or redesign pictures is Google's Picasa, which comes with the free Google pack.

Our main rule: wear the camera strap around your neck at all times!!!

Crop, sharpen, make pictures pop. Get the free Google Pack.

General Home School Photography Projects

Take photos on field trips. This will give you not only a remembrance of the event, but also a way to remember academic facts that go with the trip.

Use family photos or assign children to take new pictures to use to make books with simple sentences for beginning readers. This is a good project for children who are a eight or older to make for a younger sibling, friend or relative who's learning to read.

Send kids on an educational scavenger hunt. Have them photograph arachnids, mammals, things that are alive, things that photosynthesize....

Use photos to document how things are made. For instance, show the steps in breadmaking, or water purification, or training for a race.

Write a family newsletter or Christmas letter to be sent to relatives and friends near and far. Illustrate it with your own photos.

Make an I Spy photo.

Make a memory book of the school year.

Add photos to your yearly evaluation folder.

Language Arts Photo Projects

Write photoessays for creative writing.

For a book report, assign kids to make several photos to represent various parts of the story. They might choose to show a scene acted by friends or siblings, or use symbolic objects.

Take a special photo for use as a story starter...or trade photos with a sibling or friend.

Illustrate emails to send to relatives or faraway friends.

Use photos to illustrate an autobiography.

Make an ABC or numbers book.

Science Photo Projects

Take photos of flowers or insects instead of killing the bugs or picking the flowers. In some parks, taking living things or picking flowers is illegal., but photos are usually encouraged.

Document experiments and put the photoessay on your website. Have the children write captions for the pictures explaining each step and the results. This is a report of sorts, but much more fun to write that a paper that few will ever read. If it's a video of their experiment, it might even become the Next Big Thing on Youtube! You'll contribute to the education of millions!

Have kids take photos of butterflies or other insects at different stages of their development, then make a poster or webpage about it.

Use pictures of an animal on your Treehouse of Life page.

Document the growth of a plant or a baby sibling!

Take a picture of the same tree every two weeks or so for a year.

Create your own field guide to the flora and fauna of your neighborhood.

Social Studies Photo Projects

Make a website about your home town, or submit photos to your town's site.

Document the building of a house in your neighborhood, or a building nearby, or the creation of a new park.

Make a historical event come alive by costuming everyone and re-enacting it.

Math Photo Projects

Send kids on a geometric scavenger hunt, searching for things in the neighborhood that are square, spherical, trapezoidal, dodecahedrons, etc

Make a time-telling book that has photos of what your child does at various hours of the day.



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School Year's End

The sun is stronger, the flowers are up, the asparagus is gone...must be the end of the school year!

Of course, our school doesn't really stop, it just morphs into a more relaxed, more eclectic learning experience. The schoolbooks sit on the shelf, ready for reading up in the treehouse, while the games and puzzles are easily available, and the science equipment ends up out on the picnic table satisfying the curiosity of young minds.

Inside, I'm sorting through piles of worksheets and computer photo albums for material to put into our end-of-the-year portfolios. Our state requires that a bit of our children's work be examined by a certified teacher, or some sort of standardized testing, so I usually opt for making the thick folders of papers and having a friend look them over and sign for us. Jim has eight children, all of whom were or are homeschooled for at least part of their education, so he knows the ropes quite well.





I look for samples of work that show practice in several of the areas that we covered during the year, and the kids pick out their favorites. Sometimes I use World Book's Typical Course of Study to help me figure out what to include, but, since every child is unique, I don't stick too closely to it. I try to put in the best of the best, but not to overload poor Jim with stacks of papers that really belong in the recyclable bin!

When I have the papers from my stacks, I separate each child's pile into subjects and use pieces of colored paper to separate them. The kids like to decorate these, and I write a short paragraph about each child's achievements and difficulties of that year. Then I put the pages into portfolios with pockets, along with sports certificates, photos of field trips and art projects, and even cds of computer projects and graphic design examples.

During the search for the perfect papers, I'll also make notes about possible ideas and challenges for next year. It always amazes me how a child can seem to have no grasp at all of a complex procedure like long division in the spring, but by fall it seem to come into focus with almost no effort. A bit of maturity can make a huge difference!

When the folders are finally complete, I copy the necessary paperwork from my state, and take it all to Jim, who'll check it and sign the forms. Then we are finally free to call it a school year. It's time to sign up for the library's book club, get out the bathing suits and squirt guns, and enjoy the hikes and stargazing.





Sometime I think that we all learn nearly as much in the three months of summer than we do in the whole academic year, though the learning is of a bit of a different sort. I do try to plan an activity for every day, if only to break the apparent monotony (also known as "I'm bored!") and stealthily fill their mind with brain food. Even the older teens will paint on the sidewalk, go to the zoo or check out the water bears under the microscope. And everyone will watch water start a fire or spike a bonfire with chemicals for color!

By next fall, I'll be happy to get some type of routine going again and the kids will be secretly glad too, though they may not admit it!