It’s always a challenge to find activities to do with your tween-aged and teen-aged grandchildren.  If they have access to a digital camera — or if they have a cell phone that can take pictures — there are several photo games that you can play with your grandchildren.

Over the next several posts, I’m going to share 4 photography games that you can play with your grandchildren. Be sure to come back to find out what they are.

Before I explain how to play the first game, let me recommend that you (or your grandchild) create a blog where you share your photos.  If you have more than one grandchild playing with you, you don’t have the hassle of sending the pictures back and forth to lots of people.  There’s just one spot to see them.  Each individual uploads their own picture.

So, here we go.  Here’s the first game.

Photo of the Day

Grandma, you select three words and tell them to your grandchildren.  Your grandchildren have seven days to select one word, take a photo that represents the word and post it to the blog. That’s it.  That’s all the rules.  Easy, huh?

The idea behind this is to encourage creativity while having fun taking pictures and sharing them.

For example, let’s say that ’round’ was one of the words. Of course your grandchild could take a picture of a basketball, a wheel on a car, or a door knob.  That would be dandy.  But when encouraged to be more creative, your grandchild might take a picture of a sibling’s mouth while the sibling says the word “oh.”  Or a picture of a slice of an orange.  Or the head of a nail.

Get the idea?  Good!

You can take turns being the person who selects the words.  You can play only one round (a round is a week) or you can do this for a month — or however long your grandchild has interest in the activity.   Whatever suits your situation best.

For a moment, think ahead toward summertime when you might be having a reunion.  Send out the three words to all of your grandchildren.  They take a photo and e-mail it to you.  You print them up.  Then, at the reunion, display the photos and have the cousins guess who took the pictures.  The one who got the most correct answers gets a prize.

Hope you have fun taking pictures!