How hard is it to get your children interested in history? From experience if it isn’t a big lizard with jaggy teeth and chases smaller jaggy toothed lizards the kids usually don’t want to know. But why is that? It seems to be their imagination and how cool they might be. Admit it, if you were to choose between finding out about dinosaurs and the ’slaves’ that built the pyramids you’d choose the dinosaurs every time.

Enter the Horrible History books. Just when you thought you couldn’t get a child to read a book these come along. Theres something faintly disturbing about a young boys fascination with disgusting things and I’m talking as an adult who still likes playing with slime and turning my dinner into mash potato monsters just like Calvin. But thanks to that fascination these books just get the kids hook line and sinker.

The most recent one that I looked at was a Christmas present to my step-son all about ancient Egypt. Despite a few inaccuracies the books manage to fill the kids full of facts that they’ll be repeating for years. I only picked up on a few things that may be misleading or wrong because I follow Bob Brier’s work on mummies thanks to my own fascination with the subject but as far as a 6-7 year old is concerned they won’t know the difference!

On March 20, there will be the first ever World Film Photography Day. It’s got to that stage where film photographers have to push to be remembered almost.

Over at Foreignlight Julia Scho is running a small blog carnival to highlight the day and get people thinking about their photography. Answer a few questions and if you get your reply in before the 5th March and you live within the EC your in with a chance of getting one of her disposable cameras to use on the day.

I’ve long been a fan of film photography but I lack many of the skills needed to be a succesful film photographer and I don’t have the cash to work on them. This is where digital comes into it’s own as you have no development costs but at the same time it looses that mystique that film has. Up until very recently I still used my trusty Canon compact over my digital when I wanted good crisp photos.

As I mentioned earlier its almost as if the film photographers by having this day are standing on a box shouting “Hey we’re still here you know!” I walked into my local camera shop the other day and was actually shocked to find where they once had a wall of film to choose from they now had a small display of memory cards and maybe 6 brands/types of film. They didn’t even have any B&W film in stock!

I’ve still got a few rolls of film about the house so I may just give this a go but I think I actually may invest in a couple of disposable cameras and give one to our eldest for him to record his day and I’ll use the other to try and get our middle child interested in photography. He’s got the toy camera but he’s at that age where looking through the lens is more fun that looking through the eyepiece! It would be good to let the boys know where photography came from, they see me with my camera all the time so it’s about time I started passing on the fascination.

All over the internet you’ll find Star Wars Lego these days. Very few folk manage to pull off something different with it though and the recent trend of steampunk-ing classic Star Wars ships seems got the creative juices flowing.

Tim Goddard has managed to create a scene from each Star Wars film that fits neatly under a plastic dome. It isn’t until you look closely and realise the scale of the models that you stop imaging them as small snowglobes.