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The Upside-Down Picture: A Pinhole Camera Research Project

Read how two art club partners research pinhole cameras from four sides, then practice asking strong questions and plan a project of your own.

Grade 4ELAInteractive · Printable

Aligned toW.4.7

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What’s included

Single worksheet
Auto-graded online
1 Common Core standard
Printable answer key
9 questions
Classroom-ready

Details

Format: Interactive · Printable
Grade: Grade 4
Subject: ELA
Question types: Fill in the blank, Multiple choice, Matching, Circle the answer, Sorting, Short answer

About this worksheet

What students practice

Students divide a research topic into parts and match each part to a useful source.
Students choose research questions that build knowledge about one part of a topic.
Students plan a new research question and source for a short project.

How to use

Read the passage together and list the four parts of the topic on the board, then have students answer the questions and finish the planning section on their own.

Curriculum

Common Core standard covered

W.4.7

Conduct a short research project that builds knowledge by investigating different aspects of a topic.

Preview

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The Upside-Down Picture: A Pinhole Camera Research Project

See how two partners split a topic into parts and research each one.

Read about the project

Read how Deshawn and Lin researched pinhole cameras.

The Box That Made a Picture

1When the art club at Lakeview Elementary began a unit on photography, Mr. Castillo held up a cardboard box with a tiny hole in one end. "This is a pinhole camera," he said. "Your job is to find out all you can about it." Deshawn and Lin teamed up. They decided to research four parts of the topic: how a pinhole camera works, where the idea came from, how to build one, and how people use pinhole viewers today.

2To learn how it works, the partners read a science book from the classroom shelf. The book explained that light travels in straight lines. When light from a bright scene passes through a tiny hole into a dark box, it makes a picture on the inside wall across from the hole. The picture is upside down, because light from the top of the scene travels down through the hole, and light from the bottom travels up.

3Next, Lin searched a history website. She learned that people noticed this trick of light hundreds of years ago. Some people turned a whole darkened room into a giant viewer by letting light in through one small hole. This kind of room was called a camera obscura, which means "dark room" in Latin. That is where our word camera comes from.

4For the building part, Deshawn watched a video made by a children's science museum. It showed how to make a simple viewer from a shoebox, a square of foil and a sheet of wax paper. The foil covers a hole at one end, and the wax paper becomes the screen. The video also warned that a bigger pinhole makes a brighter picture, but a blurrier one.

5Last, the partners asked Mr. Castillo how people use pinhole viewers today. He explained that during a solar eclipse, people use them to watch the shape of the sun change without looking straight at the sun, which can hurt their eyes.

6Deshawn and Lin sorted their notes into four piles, one for each part of the topic. Then they built a viewer of their own and pointed it at the sunny playground. Lin peeked at the wax paper and laughed. "The trees are standing on their heads!"

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