Sequencing Photos

Helen came down yesterday for help in preparing a class activity. She wanted us to take photos of her preparing a fruit salad. Her pre-primary class will be making their own tomorrow (Tuesday) and they are doing this activity beforehand. It involves 4 photos printed on a sheet of paper. Each photo is of a step in the fruit salad preparation. The children have to cut up the sheet and rearrange them in the correct order, explaining what they have done.

We took about 20 digital photos as she made the salad and then she chose 4. Kevin put them all on an A4 sheet and printed off 24 copies. Bit of a delay when one of the colour inks ran out and he had to refill the cartridge but they were all finished in plenty of time.

She arrived about 10.30 and left shortly after 3. In this time we had gone shopping for the fruit, the salad making was organised and photographed and the activity sheets completed. We had also had lunch. I couldn't help thinking how much easier the digital age has made some tasks for teachers.

In the dark ages if you took photos of anything you were doing with kids you had to wait till you had finished a roll of film, get it processed, then often discover that a vital photo was blurred or out of focus or hadn't actually been taken. An activity like this one would have taken days of planning, physical cut and paste and then reproduction of the sheets by black and white photocopier. Even further back in the dark ages it would have involved a Gestetner printer or even a Fordigraph and photos could not even be considered.

I did not often take photos of student work for the above reasons. Kevin, of course, being a photography teacher was much more adept and always took photos of the students in his class for his marks book, but he still had to wait a day for the processing. Helen can take photos of her students and download them instantly to a computer for them to see.

And what happened to the fruit salad? No, we didn't eat it for lunch. She took it to a picnic concert in Kings Park that evening.