Every major holiday time, the schools break up and the young people have a couple of weeks off. But for many families, this puts a strain on their resources, finances and time, especially if parents have to continue working and are forced to arrange childcare. Research has shown that this leads to less out of school activities for children and young people, more ‘unhealthy’ choices over holiday time, and more social isolation.
This where the HAF programme comes in!
Started as several pilot schemes in 2018, the programme was rolled out to local authorities in 2021. Designed to provide consistent and easily accessible enriching activities, healthy and varied food options (that both children and parents are involved in). The other part of the provision is to involve local partnerships and connections with voluntary and community interest organisations, such as In Focus.
This has been a new venture for us, and as such is only the second time we have been involved in the Hampshire HAF – first was the 2022 winter holiday activities in February, and most recently this April for the Easter holiday. Both times was organised by the Community interest company ActiveMe 360 – primarily working to improve health and wellbeing with sport, physical activity and education. They partnered with us to add Photography activities into the mix, for a well-rounded set of activities for all.
We’ve travelled all over Hampshire this Easter to a variety of schools, in Gosport, Fareham, with ActiveMe 360, and each time we have split the groups we work with into one set of older young people and one set of the youngest – the idea being that there is a limit to the attention span of young children when it comes to learning professional camera equipment! To solve this issue, we combine some simple photography techniques with some easy to get into collage.
We try to incorporate skills that we teach older young people and adults as well; use of shutter speeds, aperture control, framing and composition and exposure are all explored with all age groups in our sessions. We combine these techniques with scavenger hunts to find words such as Time, Blur, Movement and Frozen. For the younger ones we split them into small groups to work together to find one colour (typically Red, Green and Blue) and then build a object out of collage materials like magazines and newspapers incorporating their pictures from the scavenger hunt which we print out for them!
We usually get an incredible response from all the young people involved in the activities, and many of them are particularly engaged as they are not generally able to access digital camera equipment, printers, etc, and we often have students remark they’d love their own camera and have the desire to continue taking pictures in the future! Which is exactly what we want and love to hear.
We’ve had such positive feedback from the two sessions we’ve had in the past two collaborations with ActiveMe 360, and we’re really looking forward to Summer 2022 when we’ll be back hopefully working with them again, and in schools all around Hampshire!