We’ve found numerous sources online of assignments for K-12 photography, visual literacy, and related issues. As a matter of policy, we provide reference access only to those that publish material by permission of the authors. Here are links to those:
- Adobe Education: This software manufacturer posts a considerable amount of K-12 photo ed-related material at its site, including instructional material, lesson plans, and even more ambitious semester-long curricula. They’ve also created a Digital Kids Club section of the site.
- Borneo Teacher’s Guide: Kids Across the World, A Photographic Journey: Credited to Literacy Through Photography, this lesson plan concerns the life of a boy in Borneo, but is really about reading photographs. (PDF download)
- Kodak Lesson Plans: Hidden away on the Kodak website, inaccessible through the site’s search engine via any terms we could find, and with defective links at the bottom of each plan page, we discovered (purely by chance, via Google) a veritable treasure trove of K-12 photo-ed lesson plans: 146 in all. Apparently submitted by teachers through some unspecified process, each one indicates the authors thereof, academic subjects to which it’s relevant, and the grades for which it’s appropriate. Plus a good, clear description and report on results. Looks like some fine stuff here. If any volunteer wants to try to find out when and where these came from, whether there’s an index of them with synopses online, etc., please do so and let us know. Perhaps Kodak could be persuaded to upgrade their presentation of these, and make them more accessible. Meanwhile, the only way to navigate them is to go to one and, to get to another, change the lesson plan number in the URL field of your browser. We suggest starting with “Know Your Town; Let Your Town Know You!” by Katherine Coady and Howard Herbert, the last in the series, and then working your way backward by changing the URL to read “. . . /lessonPlans/lessonPlan145.shtml,” etc. (Note: We did discover one index page for Special Education Lesson Plans at this site.)
- National Archives: The National Archives of the United States offers, at its website, an excellent set of Teaching with Documents Lesson Plans, many of them involving photographs by such figures as Lewis Hine.
- National Geographic Kids: Short, simple tutorials and exercises. We recommend “Tricky Pics,” a short, simple tutorial on digital manipulation of photographs, and “Photo Fill-Ins,” a captioning exercise. Also their extensive Photo Galleries. Kids can upload their own images to the MyShot Gallery.
- New Deal Network: Offers two lesson plans based on the social-documentary work of photographer Rondal Partridge (son of photographer Imogen Cunningham).
- New York Times — Photojournalism: Lesson plans for grades 6-12, based on current/recent articles in the Times. Created by The NYT Learning Network. (Note: These lesson plans get replaced over time. If you find one you want to continue using, download it and its related materials for archiving.)
- NoodleTools.com: Recommended lesson plans here include “The More You Look, The More You See: Creating a Turn-of-the-Century Child” by Debbie Abilock & Cynthia Hirsch Kosut, which uses old photos to teach research skills, visual literacy, and more, and “Reading Media Photographs” by Abilock.
- PBS TeacherSource: The Arts & Literature section of this site contains lesson plans based on PBS programs suitable for various grade levels, including ones on Robert Capa, Sally Mann, and W. Eugene Smith.
- Pinhole Photography: A Guidebook for Teachers, by N.C. Dvoracek. Thorough how-to on the pinhole process.
- “Slide-Tape Dramatization as a Way of Teaching Literature“: by Robert J. Winters, from the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute. Dated 1979, and involving pre-digital technology, but easily adaptable to such contemporary applications as Keynote/PowerPoint.“Ten ways to use the digital camera in RE [Religious Education]“: Smart ideas in this anonymous lesson plan (dated 2005), from which one can extrapolate to nonsectarian applications.
- Learn NC: From this program of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, School of Education, a cluster of “visual literacy” lesson plans that include a number involving photographs. See, for example, “Haiku and photography: A natural connection,” “North Carolina living through photos, then and now,” and “Reading photographs.”
- Visual Literacy: A series of lessons and assignments from AT&T, as part of a “21st-Century Literacies” curriculum.
- YouthLearn: This site offers several excellent lesson plans for photography projects, plus others on video, PowerPoint and dfferent presentation methods, and even critical thinking.
