You Oughta Be in Pictures: YouthLearn's Intro to Making Videos

Video can be one of the most powerful forms of communication, and it offers a tremendous vehicle for learning. Experiencing video production, even in its most basic form, can open new career opportunities and avenues for personal expression. It teaches kids about multimedia communication with action and motion, and it helps them reinforce a variety of other skills, including critical thinking, literacy, interpersonal communication, collaboration, public speaking, composition, storytelling and group decision making.

Studying video has another advantage: It helps teach vital media literacy skills so kids can understand how the many images they encounter every day affect them and so they can observe those images with a more critical eye.

Working with video isn't something you can just jump right into, however. Children must be prepared for it with preliminary excursions into concepts like storyboarding and photography. Each stage can be made fun and educational, and at the end of the project, the children will understand how all the pieces come together to make a video they're proud to show parents, friends and the world by putting it on the Internet. Children as young as age five can make a video with the proper guidance and preparation.