About eighteen months ago we gave our daughters (five and six years old) a couple of kid-friendly digital cameras. My daughters love taking pictures with their little cameras and take them on almost every hike, trip to the wildlife park, and just about every new place that we visit.
My daughters little cameras store roughly 800 pictures before they have to be transferred to a computer or deleted. I’ve had to do this handful of times since they got the cameras.
It was while looking through a batch of 800 pictures they took that it dawned on me that the value of their cameras for us as parents is to get some insight into how our kids view nature and what they think is interesting. Aside from pictures of fingers partially covering the lens and blurry shots of feet there were lots of pictures of rocks they found interesting, close-ups of flower petals, pictures of worms and bugs, and some pictures of our dogs.
Tomorrow we’re going on our first spring hike of 2023. I can’t wait to see the pictures they take there! More importantly, I can’t wait to hear them talk about the pictures that they took and why they took them. I guess you could say we’re starting to dive into the world of digital storytelling.
Digital storytelling with the pictures that kids take is one of the things that I’ll talk about in more depth in next week’s webinar, Blending Technology Into Outdoor Learning. I hope you’ll join me for the webinar.