Photo Essays

Photo essays allow young people to share their experiences, historical retellings, information about processes and cycles, and field trips. For instance, a teen who lives on a farm might create a photo essay on homemade goat milk cheese.

Use photo picture books as inspiration. The Owen & Mzee website has lots of examples and resources along with examples of other books.

Visual Identification

Ask students to define concepts in a visual way.

Think about new types of assignments such as Show Me What You Know using new tools like Glogster.

Ask students to complete the activities at Edhead: Simple Machines. Then, involve children in taking digital photos of simple machines at school and create a PowerPoint slide. Use bubbles to identify the simple machines in the photos.

Historical Scrapbooks

Provide young people with photo collections to jumpstart projects.

Read Bread and Roses, Too by Katherine Paterson. Explore lesson ideas at Mass Moments, Teaching Tolerance. Open the PowerPoint starter called Bread and Roses, Too (PPT). Create your own scrapbook.

Option 1: Build a PowerPoint Photo Starter
Right-click and save Historypic.ppt. Write an assignment in the Speakernotes. Or, record an audio assignment.
For more images, go to Library of Congress and do a search. For instance, search for "children," "kitchen" or "general store." Also check out the Library of Congress Flickr Photo project.

Option 2: Create a Glogster Sample Project
Create a sample project using Glogster. Use microscopic images such as those at Dennis Kunkel's website.