Help with Educating/interesting Kids in Photography

Hi all!

I'm preparing for my second year as our county fair photog. dept. superintendent. I am trying to drum up ideas for educational displays that will interest kids, and fire up an interest in photography, or keep them interested.

Our department has roughly 600 entries per year, beginning at age 5 and our entries in the children/youth category are growing every year. This year, I'm scraping the bottom of my creative barrel and need help.

In the past, we've had pin hole cameras, fun facts, puzzles made from 8x10s, posters, but I really would like to find some inexpensive interactive learning displays (that are CHEAP!!!). I had thought about having an instamatic camera, where the kids could take a picture of themselves, and display it in a mock gallery at the bottom of the entry display panels (kid-height) with a note " mommy '05 by brittany jones age 3" or some silly something like that...

Anyone with any ideas - please toss them into the ring!

thanks!

nina

Hello Nina.
Now i'm trying to grasp what you really are after,
my thoughts are it needs to be interactive with lots of kids , right ?
So how about going Mosaic and i mean huge mosaic say 8ft x 4ft minimum. mount on board .
think back to Roman times and the fantastic floor panels they made.
now lets do the same with the kids own pictures, first think about the way a photo mosaic is made of hundreds of small thumbnails to form a pattern or a face, sure you may have seen this type of pic in books etc,
vary light pics make whites of eyes skin tone slightly darker ton prints, hair darker brown tone, sky back ground all dif shades of blue & so on.
so really the kids would be looking to find or take the type of colours associated with the sort of subject you set as theme.
as an alternative it could also be set out like a huge patchwork quilt with a grid sketched out on the board / boards ready for individual children / parents to apply there standard size enprints.
think this would create quite a few pictures in its own right, no reason images could be pics of parents, kids, anything that suits .
dont forget the permanent exhibition afterwards.
sorry if I looked at this from wrong point of view.
Best Wishes
Martin (Huckaback Photo)

Very nice suggestion, Martin! I like it!

While we have a LOT of entries, oru fair isn't really that large, and getting folks to come through the open class buildings (where photog. and art are located) can be a real trick... seems folks mainly want rides, food and animals. ;o)

I don't know if we'd generate enough for a 4x8 - but we could sure try, and encourage adults to participate! Maybe if the 4x8 panel were designed to look like a poster that says "Look Who's Been to the Fair!" and they could place their photograph in a pre-drawn grid...

You're thinking along the lines of exactly what I need! Thanks a bunch! This is such a fun job, and I hope each year we encourage more children to capture their perspective on film, or digitally!

neens

Cheers great to know its of some help.

I gave a talk on black & white photog to a group of Children many years ago, all of them belonged to the group because of there vary high..IQ. that made me realise how much switched on some can be and pick things up so fast.
I also ran an adult evening class for a local authority on photography and mainly black & white , take/process/printing etc.
now in that class some simply had no idea about what was really involved, indeed finding it hard to grasp any topic.
So my thoughts...its better to encourage the youngsters into photog at an early age. Digital is great for this as to the instant results.

other thoughts get a local print shop involved. ie. sponsor in some way /offer a discount to kids involved. Local press ?
set a theme of say primary colours, construct a huge rainbow of colour prints sure you know what i'm saying, the first year it may struggle to take off. but do it next year as well.
one for parents, one for kids.?
Best of luck
Martin