Pinhole cameras

My job has slightly changed and I no longer cover most of the art in school. I'm now in a y3 class full time, but will endeavour to squeeze in as many creative oppportunities as possible. Today for instance we started a science unit on Light & Shadow so by way of an introduction to light and its properties I decided to follow up the origami boxes from last term by making pinhole cameras - using exactly the same origami techniques! We made one box from a piece of A5 black sugar paper and one, slightly smaller out of tracing paper. The second one fits inside the first and hey presto, one small pin hole in the black box and you have a functioning pinhole camera. You get fairly decent images on the tracing paper screen - good enough to realise that the image is upside down and reversed (will lead us into looking at the structure of the eye). The whole thing can be improved by making a small black paper 'hood' to shield the screen. The children were amazed to realise that a functioning camera could be made from just two pieces of paper. Lets hope they're just as fascinated with the (simple) explanation of how it works!