Origami Stories

Do these look familiar to you?  If your students are anything like mine, you're discovering these darling creations all over your classroom - in desks, on the floor, fluttering past your head....   ;-)
So...why not harness your students' natural paper-folding tendencies to create origami?

Last week our team welcomed Storigami artist and storyteller Christine Petrell Kallevig to our school. She was pretty awesome  - demonstrating to the students how to fold a series of origami figures along with a story. A hat transformed into smaller and smaller kites and then into a crane.......    A pond morphed into a turtle and - poof! A box!

My sixth graders particularly liked her modular origami - colorful figures created using multiple component papers.  Each child can create one simple shape and then join them together into a larger object.  Isn't that red, white, and blue swan fantastic?!

 A class origami project could be an awesome team-builder at the beginning of the year or maybe a fun end-of-the-year closing activity. If you have time to fill during the last days of school, you could show your students a few videos and let them have at it. (Also works as a great way to clear out those stacks of old dittos you know you'll never use!)
If you're looking for instructions, video, and other ideas, the Origami Resource Center website is terrific.

Star Wars origami anyone?