Child Workshop Issues

Some issues that arose in testing my lesson plan:

• I started out by teaching Christian about how to take a photo and how to try different compositions when taking photos. I had her try close shots, shots from below and shots from above. We took several pictures and then loaded them onto my mac book. I had to prompt her to try new things with the camera because I believe she is used to just pointing and shooting instead of considering the picture first.
• When we loaded the pictures onto my computer we use iPhoto to edit them. She had never used the program before so I had to teach her the basics. I showed her how to crop, add special effects, change the colouring through things like saturation, exposure and contrast. I took a succession of pictures of her sliding down a pole on the playground so we used those to try different effects. She liked changing the colours and seemed to have a lot of fun with the process.
• Next, we took the altered photos and put them into Keynote where we added different animation effects and transitions to show her journey down the pole in an interesting way. She seemed a little less interested in this step. Christian tends to have a very short attention span and looses focus on tasks if they aren't changed or altered frequently. I found this occurred several times in our experiences.
• After doing the photography with Christian I sent her home with a disposable camera so that she could take some photos on her own. I was hoping that we could then take those photos and alter them manually with paint and drawing materials. When I got the photos back from being developed I did not see any photos we could do something very meaningful with so I just gave her them to keep.
• I was thinking about the things that Christian is into and remembered that she likes to play games on the computer where you put different outfits on virtual dolls. This lead me to my final project with Christian. I decided to explore fashion design with her so I brought some templates of different clothing items for her to colour in and design. She only spent about 10 minutes on this activity before she wanted to move onto something else. I decided after this that I would leave my lesson plan for her to do the rest at home.

I believe that now every detail of situations can be anticipated. Planing breaks for play is important for a responsive teaching approach because it keeps the student focused and energized for the task at hand. There are no safety issues that I could see arising.