I Just Got Back from School

I will share with you what my students were working on for the last 11 weeks. It sounds very grand, but it's actually just 11 hours total because we're only working for an hour every week. It's an After School Activity at Brent-IRRI in Los Baños, Laguna, and it's on Scrapbooking and Photography. Sound a bit much? Yeah, I think so too. Maybe next year I'm going to separate those classes.

Anyway, I'm not really a photographer but I know some basic things I could teach the kids like utilizing natural light, effect of the combination of light, shade and shadow in photography, golden hour (but my class was in mid-afternoon so it was just words), rule of thirds, get close to the subject, holding the camera straight, etc. So these are just some samples of what they did:

By Iman Ismail, Fourth Grade

By Isabelle Douthewaite, First Grade

By Xyla Fitzwell, Second Grade

By Anna Heuer, Kindergarten

By Mami Hosen, Third Grade

Aren't they neat? They just used digital point and shoot cameras for this, but for their grade levels, I thought they did really, really well.

The other part of our ASA is Scrapbooking. Below is a stack of scrapbooks they did. They scrapped the photos they took. I prepared the materials for covers and cut the interior pages. They put together the covers and we punched the sides for the binding rings. We didn't really use any fancy brand-named materials. We just want them to experience to make their first ever album.

Instead of patterned paper, we used giftwrapping paper. We used ordinary acid-free glue stick for all the papers, and a different kind of glue for embellishments. I bought a lot of buttons, ribbons, flowers, feathers, transfer letters and sequins in various shapes. There were a lot of leftovers so I divided them to six, bagged them and gave the rest to them. They were sooooooo excited about that. Next year, I think I'm going to let them use 'real' scrapbooking papers.

So, here are the scrapbooks they did.



There will be an exhibit of their works on Friday, April 30. I sure will be there to support them while they present their work. I'm telling you, these are the sweetest, most innocent kids I ever met. And they did some really, really wonderful job.