This year for Remembrance Day our school planned an exhibition of work. As with any time of remembrance and reflection, the community comes together to support each other. Differences are put aside and similarities are found between us.
I wanted the Foundation Stage exhibition of poppies to show this so I took inspiration from the new Everyone Can Create Photography guide.
Physical Art
First of all, children drew their own simple representation of the iconic poppy symbol of The Royal British Legion.
Photography
When the drawing is finished, children take the iPad and open the pre-installed PhotoBooth app. This Apple app is installed out-of-the-box and has 9 filters to use. For this activity, the children used the kaleidoscope filter.
As the children moved the iPad over their drawing, the kaleidoscope filter transforms their artwork digitally. There’s lots of opportunity to try different parts of the picture here to get the best effect, children enjoy reviewing and evaluating their work and the photography gives purpose to the mark making which encourages those reluctant mark makers in your setting.
Digital Art
The finished artwork was printed wirelessly from the iPad (or uploaded to your cloud storage account by the app of that cloud storage service provider for printing from a laptop or computer).
Exhibition
As a collection of artwork you will notice the individuality of each child’s work. Their poppies all look different but are all presented as high quality pieces of work for 4 and 5 year olds. What you notice next is how as a collection there is a togetherness about them. Despite the differences, the kaleidoscope filter brings their individual images together in this community piece.
Everyone Can Create
There are plenty of photography project ideas in Apple’s new Everyone Can Create Photography Guide and it’s a free download. These project guides are aimed at upper primary school but have lots of examples of how photography can inspire children in reading, writing and maths.
The Rich Potential of Children’s Photography
To further help you bring photography in to early learning, I have written ‘The Rich Potential of Young Children’s Photography’ which is a free guide based on the principles of Everyone Can Create.
This book is part of the Young Children Can Create series written in collaboration with Kristi Meeuwse and Jason Milner. Read more about The Young Children Can Create series here.
Read more uses of PhotoBooth in early years in these previous blog posts of mine:
PhotoBooth and Inclusion in Art.
