Our inspiration this week came from an episode of NOVA: The Origami Revolution. This link is to a preview available on Youtube. Origami is not new in schools, but I loved showing students the way scientists are learning from nature and artists to think about how to improve space missions, medicine, robots, and of course math! This young lady excelled at each origami shape she tried. My favorite site for free videos and PDF downloads is Origami-fun. The spring inspired patterns we used are listed in order of easy to hard below. For practice I cut 26 cm squares from newspapers. With a paper cutter, I cut off the fold and the folded edge to get 8-10 squares from two cuts! Once a student successfully mastered a shape, each was able to pick out a piece of 12 inch scrapbook paper I found on sale at the local craft store.
1-Drinking cup
2-Bird
3-Puffy Bunny
4-Lily flower