I have done origami in the past with children with huge success. They love creating the folds and watching animals begin to form and usually I find once they understand the basics get lost in the process of making and creating without much want of me.
However for some reason, this was not the case when I introduced origami cranes in the Paper and Sculpture camp. I mean how could you not do origami in a camp all about paper and sculptures? But for whatever reason, none of us could get them to work.
I wanted to bail on the project but the mother voice in my head kept telling me to continue so the kids could learn a valuable lesson of not giving up when things get hard. So let me just say this, I AM SO PROUD of these young artist. While I led them down the garden path to nowhere, they stayed with me until even I had to cry "uncle".
However I refused to give up and walk away, what kind of example would that set with the kids? So I told them sometimes you have to be able to bend and look at a problem in a new way when things are not working out.
So instead of origami crane sculptures, we created origami crane collages using the only the basic shapes they would find in a finished origami sculpture and all the tossed aside papers of less than successful prior origami attempts.
I think they came out really great, I loved the graphic nature of the collages with the pretty origami papers and it was quite interesting to what how each child interpreted what we had learned along the way down the winding garden path to nowhere with the original project.
We took lemons and made lemonade and my hope is that beyond the project, the kids filed away that hope is not lost in even the most hopeless of situations if you are willing to relook at the problem and solve it another way.
So now on to a project that was VERY fun for the same group of kids. This was a paper "painting" project that I saved for the last day of camp since there would be no worries about drying times. And lo and behold, they had a great time doing it.
This is created with colored card stock and those little round circles that have adhesive on both sides to not only stick the papers together but also create raised layers.
Sorry but I don't know what those things are really called, if you do please share so I am far more succinct in the future.
The kids and I together created the beginnings of the base until they got the hang of the concept, which took very little time. Each paper is a little smaller than the last, creating layers of colorful sky and water.
From there, each artist began to add details to create their own visual story. Above we have a person being eaten by sharks after falling off a boat. Those little confetti's are blood.
Gruesome but oh so creative.
There were whales and sailboats all cut out of layers of paper. To say the kids enjoyed cutting and figuring out their own way to "paint" with paper would be an understatement. This project really held their attention until the end of camp. I hardly had time to photograph them before the parents were picking them up and I was saying goodbye for the last time.
Here's to warm days ahead full of lots of sunshine and when it's not, the ability to take those lemons and make some delicious lemonade until the sun shines again.
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