With the Railway school’s TMS classes on hold as the girls sit their quarterly exams, Ilana and I have a chance to catch everyone up on what’s been happening in our classrooms lately. At Railway we teach separate classes with 16 girls each. We plan our lessons together, which allows us to give each other feedback on which elements worked and which didn’t.

In our first few weeks we focused on introducing digital photography. After our basic lessons using diagrams (on/off button, lens, shutter, display, etc.) and group camera practice we introduced the idea of framing–“what you include or exclude from the picture.” We gave each girl a paper frame and took them on a walk around the courtyard. As they held up their frame to imagine what they shots they would take they started to understand that they have the power to decide what’s inside the frame.

Lalitha, Jayashree, Krishna Veni (8th year students in Kara's class)

Explaining “composition” and “perspective” the next day proved to be a bit more difficult. We’ve learned from more recent lessons that the girls understand definitions and also homework instructions much better if we print them out. Railway is an English-medium school, but our American accents are difficult to keep up with!

Additionally, the girls had some difficulty imagining that the elements they were including in their pictures could be arranged in different ways. We didn’t want to leave them confused but also wanted to keep class proceeding to new activities and concepts, so Ilana and I came up with an exaggerated example for the girls to practice and wrap-up composition and perspective in the next class.

We divided each of our girls into small groups, each of which had a camera and a task: take photos of things around the schoolyard…as an elephant or an ant. Half the girls had to look through the lens as if they were tiny crawlers and half as if they were galumphing beasts. Some of the results are below, and you can check out more photos in the Elephants & Ants set on our Flickr page!

A new vANTage point

Another ant shot

Elephant!

Hello, elephant

The girls are also making great progress with storytelling and expression (more on that in the coming days), but they are always eager for more time using the cameras!