Aperture Lesson for an 8 year old

Since my 8 year old daughter is always taking off with my camera (she loves to steal my camera phone!) I thought I would try to teach her about photography and if she ran away I would know she was too young but she is actually very intrigued and understands what I am saying so I first showed her basic parts of the camera and how they worked and how to focus using the focal points, making sure to press the shutter button half way down before re-composing a shot.
"Focus-Compose-Click". 

Karissa took this photo of herself in the mirror.

I also taught her about Aperture.  This can be tricky to understand but here is how I explained it to her.
Aperture settings are known as F-stops and control the Depth-of-Field or how blurry the background is, also known as Bokeh.  The LOWER the F-stop number (like 2) the LARGER or wider the lens opening (as shown below) resulting in more light and less time to develop the background so it turns out blurry.  If you are doing a landscape then you might want the foreground AND the background in focus so you would use a SMALL Aperture or HIGHER F-stop like F-22.

Here are some photos that she took to practice. 
Using my 50mm lens she used a Large Aperture of about f/2.8
so she didn't need to use the flash in this low-lit room.