1. Teacher Guide
This lesson is designed to teach kids to ask a critical thinking question that you can’t just put into a search box to solve. To do that, we encourage them with smaller questions that search can help them answer. Make sure that you read the notes for each slide: they not only give you teaching tips but also provide answers and hints so you can help the kids if they are having trouble.
Remember, you can always send feedback to the Bing in the Classroom team at You can learn more about the program at bing.com/classroom and follow the daily lessons on our Partners In Learning site.
Want to extend today’s lesson? Consider using Skype in the Classroom to arrange for your class to chat with another class in today’s location. And if you are using Windows 8, you can also use the Bing apps to learn more about this location and topic; the Travel and News apps in particular make great teaching tools.
Nell Bang-Jensen is a teacher and theater artist living in Philadelphia, PA. Her passion for arts education has led her to a variety of roles including developing curriculum for Philadelphia Young Playwrights and teaching at numerous theaters and schools around the city. She works with playwrights from ages four to ninety on developing new work and is especially interested in alternative literacies and theater for social change. A graduate of Swarthmore College, she currently works in the Artistic Department of the Wilma Theater and, in addition to teaching, is a freelance actor and dramaturg. In 2011, Nell was named a Thomas J. Watson Fellow and spent her fellowship year traveling to seven countries studying how people get their names.
This lesson is designed to teach the Common Core State Standard: Reading: Informational Text
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RI.3.3 Describe the relationship between a series of historical events, scientific ideas or concepts, or steps in technical procedures in a text, using language that pertains to time, sequence, and cause/effect.
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RI.3.5 Use text features and search tools (e.g., key words, sidebars, hyperlinks) to locate information relevant to a given topic efficiently.
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RI.3.7 Use information gained from illustrations (e.g., maps, photographs) and the words in a text to demonstrate understanding of the text (e.g., where, when, why, and how key events occur).

2. Understanding how light works is essential to taking good photographs
Understanding how light works is essential to taking good photographs. What are the ways that light behaves and how do photographers work to control it?
© Art Wolfe/Mint Images
Having this up as kids come in is a great settle down activity. You can start class by asking them for thoughts about the picture or about ideas on how they could solve the question of the day.

3. Understanding how light works is essential to taking good photographs
Understanding how light works is essential to taking good photographs. What are the ways that light behaves and how do photographers work to control it?
Today, we show you how the sausage is made: In the end, the photograph may appear to be an unmediated view of a bear alone in the vast, unspoiled wilderness. Now we know differently.
In reality, there’s a lot of work that goes into taking great photos. The best photographers find the right location, ensure they’re ready when the magic happens, have mastery over their equipment, and—on occasion—are able to elbow out the other shutterbugs for the right angle.
Of course, it helps to recognize a chance at an unusual shot. And there’s no better time to practice all those skills than today, on World Photo Day.
Depending on time, you can either have students read this silently to themselves, have one of them read out loud, or read it out loud yourself.

4. Understanding how light works is essential to taking good photographs
Understanding how light works is essential to taking good photographs. What are the ways that light behaves and how do photographers work to control it? 1
Web Search
Where does the light we have come from? What is light made of? 2
What exactly is the “speed of light”? How does it get here? 3
Image Search
What is reflection? What is light doing when it reflects? Find a photograph where you can see a clear reflection. 4
What is refraction? How do lenses relate to this concept? 5
Search for some tools that photographers use online. What are ways that they shape the light around them?
There are a couple of ways to use this slide, depending on how much technology you have in your classroom. You can have students find answers on their own, divide them into teams to have them do all the questions competitively, or have each team find the answer to a different question and then come back together. If you’re doing teams, it is often wise to assign them roles (one person typing, one person who is in charge of sharing back the answer, etc.)

5. Understanding how light works is essential to taking good photographs
Understanding how light works is essential to taking good photographs. What are the ways that light behaves and how do photographers work to control it? 5
Minutes
You can adjust this based on how much time you want to give kids. If a group isn’t able to answer in 5 minutes, you can give them the opportunity to update at the end of class or extend time.

6. Understanding how light works is essential to taking good photographs
Understanding how light works is essential to taking good photographs. What are the ways that light behaves and how do photographers work to control it? 1
Web Search
Where does the light we have come from? What is light made of? 2
What exactly is the “speed of light”? How does it get here? 3
Image Search
What is reflection? What is light doing when it reflects? Find a photograph where you can see a clear reflection. 4
What is refraction? How do lenses relate to this concept? 5
Search for some tools that photographers use online. What are ways that they shape the light around them?
You can ask the students verbally or let one of them come up and insert the answer or show how they got it. This way, you also have a record that you can keep as a class and share with parents, others.

7. Understanding how light works is essential to taking good photographs
Understanding how light works is essential to taking good photographs. What are the ways that light behaves and how do photographers work to control it? 1
Web Search
Where does the light we have come from? What is light made of?
(Possible queries: “for kids, where does light come from?”, “for kids, understanding light”).
From
Light is made of billions of tiny particles called photons. These photons travel from one place to another in waves. Visible light is the subset of photons that move at a wavelength that we can see. Among the different photons that are in visible light, the ones that have the longest wavelength look red to us, and the ones that have the shortest wavelength look blue to us. All colors come from different wavelengths of light. Most of the light on Earth comes to us from the Sun. The Sun shoots out billions of photons every second in all directions, and the ones that happen to be pointed toward the Earth come here.

8. Understanding how light works is essential to taking good photographs
Understanding how light works is essential to taking good photographs. What are the ways that light behaves and how do photographers work to control it? 2
Web Search
What exactly is the “speed of light”? How does it get here?
(Possible queries: “what is the speed of light?”, “how does light travel to Earth?”, “how fast does light travel to the Earth?’).
From and
To understand how light travels from the sun to the Earth, you have to understand what light is. Light is an electromagnetic wave--a wave of electric and magnetic energy oscillating very quickly. There are many different electromagnetic waves, and the type is determined by the speed of oscillation. For example, radio waves oscillate more slowly than light, while X-rays oscillate much more quickly. These electromagnetic waves travel in small packets called photons. Because light travels in both waves and photon packets, it behaves both like a wave and a particle. We know that light has a finite speed and it travels at the speed of 300,000 kilometers per second. This a great distance to travel. On earth this speed is almost instantaneous. However we now know that its limits can be determined on the larger scale of space. For example it takes about 8.3 minutes for light from the Sun to reach the Earth. To reach the nearest star to the Solar System it takes about 3 to 4 years.

9. Understanding how light works is essential to taking good photographs
Understanding how light works is essential to taking good photographs. What are the ways that light behaves and how do photographers work to control it? 3
Image Search
What is reflection? What is light doing when it reflects? Find a photograph where you can see a clear reflection.
(Possible queries: “how light behaves, reflection”, “what is a reflection of light?”, “Bing/Images: photograph with reflection”).
From
The most obvious thing about light is that it will reflect off things. The only reason we can see the things around us is that light, either from the Sun or from something like an electric lamp here on Earth, reflects off them into our eyes. Cut off the source of the light or stop it from reaching your eyes and those objects disappear. They don't cease to exist, but you can no longer see them. Reflection can happen in two quite different ways. If you have a smooth, highly polished surface and you shine a narrow beam of light at it, you get a narrow beam of light reflected back off it. This is called specular reflection and it's what happens if you shine a flashlight or laser into a mirror: you get a well-defined beam of light bouncing back towards you. Most objects aren't smooth and highly polished: they're quite rough. So, when you shine light onto them, it's scattered all over the place. This is called diffuse reflection and it's how we see most objects around us as they scatter the light falling on them. If you can see your face in something, it's specular reflection; if you can't see your face, it's diffuse reflection. Polish up a teaspoon and you can see your face quite clearly. But if the spoon is dirty, all the bits of dirt and dust are scattering light in all directions and your face disappears.
Students should then do an image search to find a photograph that features reflection. Examples found here: and here:

10. Understanding how light works is essential to taking good photographs
Understanding how light works is essential to taking good photographs. What are the ways that light behaves and how do photographers work to control it? 4
Web Search
What is refraction? How do lenses relate to this concept?
(Possible queries: “how light behaves, refraction”, “how does refraction work?”, “photography, refraction, lenses”).
From
Light waves travel in straight lines through empty space (a vacuum), but more interesting things happen to them when they travel through other materials—especially when they move from one material to another. That's not unusual: we do the same thing ourselves. Have you noticed how your body slows down when you try to walk through water? You go racing down the beach at top speed but, as soon as you hit the sea, you slow right down. No matter how hard you try, you cannot run as quickly through water as through air. The dense liquid is harder to push out of the way, so it slows you down. Exactly the same thing happens to light if you shine it into water, glass, plastic or another more dense material: it slows down quite dramatically. This tends to make light waves bend—something we usually call refraction.
Refraction is amazingly useful. If you wear eyeglasses, you probably know that the lenses they contain are curved-shape pieces of glass or plastic that bend (refract) the light from the things you're looking at. Bending the light makes it seem to come from nearer or further away (depending on the type of lenses you have), which corrects the problem with your sight. To put it another way, your eyeglasses fix your vision by slowing down incoming light so it shifts direction slightly. Binoculars, telescopes, cameras, camcorders, night vision goggles, and many other things with lenses work in exactly the same way (collectively we call these things optical equipment). Although light normally travels in straight lines, you can make it bend round corners by shooting it down thin glass or plastic pipes called fiber-optic cables. Reflection and refraction are at work inside these "light pipes" to make rays of light follow an unusual path they wouldn't normally take.

11. Understanding how light works is essential to taking good photographs
Understanding how light works is essential to taking good photographs. What are the ways that light behaves and how do photographers work to control it? 5
Web Search
Search for some tools that photographers use online. What are ways that they shape the light around them?
(Possible queries: “how do photographers control light?”, “tools photographers use for light”).
Answers will vary. For example, from
-Diffusing Light. We don’t diffuse natural light at its source—the sun. The first and the simplest way to diffuse it is through the way we position ourselves and/or our subjects in relation to the sun. For example, we can ask our subject to move (or place it, if it’s an inanimate object) into the shade or indoors, or we can simply look for subjects who are already in the shade or indoors—this will give us considerably diffused natural light to work with. We can also diffuse light with human-made diffusers, which are usually large pieces of satin stretched over a frame. The effect is the same, but the diffuser is portable. Pulling curtains over windows is another perfect example of diffusing natural light.
-Directing Light. We direct natural light in a similar manner to how we diffuse it—by moving ourselves and/or our subjects in relation to the light-source, which in this case might be the sun, if we’re outdoors and in the open, but it can also be an opening like a window, when indoors. A perfect example of directing light outdoors in the open is when we end up with a silhouette image, as in the case above. You position the subject between yourself and the sun, hence you direct the light from behind the subject or back-light it.
-Reflecting Light. We can reflect light in a few different ways. Human-made reflectors with special reflective surfaces (sometimes different colored) are the easiest to reflect light with. The human-made reflector “works” by reflecting the light off of it and directing it towards the subject. For a more pronounced effect it’s best to have the subject in diffused light (as was the case in the example image) in the shade or indoors and to have the reflector reflecting fairly bright sun rays. The closer the reflector is to the subject, the stronger the light from it. For the image above I had a friend who was holding the reflector step about fifteen feet away from the subject. He then found a spot where the rays of the sun would fall on the reflector and directed them back towards the subject from the side.
-Look for situations with multiple light sources. These situations occur in interior spaces, whether man-made or natural (e.g. a cave). In these cases, windows or other openings act as the light-sources, and, if there are a couple or a few of them, we can essentially end up with multiple light-sources.

12. Understanding how light works is essential to taking good photographs
Understanding how light works is essential to taking good photographs. What are the ways that light behaves and how do photographers work to control it?
This slide is a chance to summarize the information from the previous slides to build your final answer to the question. Students should understand that light is made of billions of tiny particles called photons. These photons travel in waves. Students should be able to describe concepts like refraction and reflection, and think about how lenses, reflectors, objects, and fabric can all help photographers diffuse and direct light to capture the photo they want.