photography projects for kids

I wrote about the basics of introducing a camera to your preschooler earlier this year.  Here are some photography projects to try to keep your child interested and improving …

• have a scavenger hunt – find things that are blue, things that start with the letter G, things with wheels, you get the idea
• take pictures and create a photo book (similar to a scavenger hunt but with a book product)– for example take photos for a counting book, a book about colours or take photos of groups of objects and create an “I Spy” book
• have your child document a day in their life
• take photos during a special outing and write a story to accompany the pictures, at the end of this post you can see the story my son and I created after visiting a local wildlife park.
• have your child take photos of the same subject using a variety of different angles
• take photos of the members of your family to create a family tree

You can also create some amazing products with photos taken by your child.  Here are some ideas …

• print the photos and make albums or photobooks
• frame their best photos
• email photos to family and friends or post them on a blog (for example, my son and I wrote about our visit to a wildlife park and emailed it to our family – you can see the story below)
• photo printing services can put a photo on a t-shirt, or a bag, a cup, a keyring, just about anything really
• print a photograph (for the best results at a large size)and cut it up to create a photo puzzle.  For more fun, you could use these instructions from Photojojo to create a photo puzzle to be sent piece by piece through the mail and put together at the other end.
• mix and match photos to create a funny photo book, instructions are here at the HP website
• upload some photos to Flickr.  You can then use tools such as those at BigHugeLabs to create fun things with your photos, such as mosaics, magazine covers or a pop art poster.

Here is a photo project my son and I made recently.  We used photos we took at a visit to a local wildlife park to write a story about our trip to send to relatives.

Today we went to the crocodile park.

Mum and I took photos.

We saw crocodiles.  One snapped his jaws.

We also saw alligators.

We saw turtles.

We saw a wombat.

We saw emus and ostriches. 

We saw an ocelot. 

We saw a tiger.

We saw kangaroos and wallabies.  The mummy kangaroo has a joey in its pouch.