Think about it for a moment. Odds are good that you’ve let your children play with your cell phone camera from time to time, but did you ever consider that the camera could open doors to learning adventures they’ll never forget?

One of the greatest benefits of homeschooling is that you are able to let your child explore his or her many interests. You will discover helpful tools as time goes by: a telescope, a microscope, a world globe, and salt dough maps, just to name a few. A newcomer to this list just happens to be one of the most powerful educational tools you can add to your collection - a digital camera.

They can use a camera to capture their world and images of the things that interest them, bringing close focus and deeper understanding. From close-up photos of trees or pets, shoes or engines, tall buildings or tree houses, the camera can help them explore and understand the world around them. It is also great to use as a tool when they want to take something apart – always take a photo of the item before and while taking it apart so that they will remember how it goes back together again.

However, before turning them loose with a camera, send them on a 4-week learning adventure to explore the world of cameras and photography, looking at the history and science involved, learning some tricks of the trade, and getting to know their camera and how it works. The new Digital Photography Unit Study Adventure is now available and provides this exploration, ready to use, interactive, and all you have to add is a camera.

This new unit study is part of the Unit Study Adventure series, 4-week unit studies that are written at two levels for grades K-12. From the daily photography scavenger hunts to the thought-provoking exploration of how cameras are used, this study covers the broad sweep of photography as well as providing interactive investigation into the basic parts of a camera and how it works. 

Consider this: it isn’t until asked to photograph three kinds of leaves that a child might begin to take a deeper look into the structure of a leaf. When challenged to take pictures of different kinds of clouds, he begins to notice the many differences in clouds, and awareness grows. In the new Digital Photography Unit Study Adventure, not only is your child challenged to explore their surroundings with a camera, they also begin to understand the workings of a camera, along with the basics of photo composition and the science of light and capturing images. They will discover the people that helped develop the earliest cameras and watch the development of photography grow from pinhole cameras to movies and much more.

Who knows, you just might learn a few things along the way. If you’re like me, you might’ve been wondering about pixels and resolution, digital zoom and all of those settings on your camera. Join in the adventure – the new Digital Photography Unit Study Adventure is ready and waiting!