The Origami Forum

Hey everyone! My art teacher wants me to teach an origami "project." What is something I could teach classmates, that trumps traditional origami, looks nice, and is easy to learn. All help is appreciated very much. Thank you.

Simple kawahata and montroll models will be good.

it depends on how old the students are, and how good their hand-eye coordination is.

i have taught origami to children before, and with very young children (kindergarten, first-second grade) anything more than simple models can get very frustrating. traditional models (cranes, waterbombs, etc., etc.) usually work well, as well as anything pureland (something that adheres strictly to mountain/valley). keep in mind even a crane can be very difficult for the inexperienced, as the concepts of petal and reverse folds may not be clear.

what about folding a simple masu box with different papers? christmas is not that far and everybody will have to hide something ...

I also did some origami teaching, and as mentioned before you really should know whom you're working with.
Also how much time have you got? Plan your time in the lesson a little.

Thank you all for your input. The teacher broke the origami section into two parts. The first was done at the beginning of this week. In that lesson, they learned some traditional things; box, water bomb, etc. In the second lesson, the teacher is already planning to teach the crane. I will have the remaining 30 minutes to teach a project. The student are in 7-12th grades.

Thirty minutes isn't a lot of time to teach something that "trumps" traditional origami to relative beginners.

What about the Magic Rose by Valerie Vann?

a butterfly may be possible - this one http://origamidb.stagepics.co.uk/images ... 1234_1.jpg by master joshizawa could be folded in about half an hour with even unskilled (but interested or motivated) people. i've tried it with children at the shool of my daughter and no one has really failed ...

as jadylyon has pointed out, 30 min is not a lot of time.

along the lines of what grizzly man suggested, the lafosse butterfly (and the variants thereof) might be possible.

a low intermediate model by montroll may also be possible. you can go to his website--i believe his bird book is available there as an e-book, and it has a few intermediate models in there that might be doable. something you could try is to see how quickly you can fold any of those models. anything more than 15 min will probably not be doable, as you have to "slow down" to show everyone the proper steps.

joshua mentioned kawahata, but i don't believe that any of his simple/intermediate model diagrams are easy to get (most of them are in tanteidans that are out of print). it is possible he misspoke and meant to say kasahara. everything in his old book, creative origami, basically "trumps" traditional origami by using it. that is, most of the models in there are derived from classic bases, or modulars thereof.

I'd have to say traditional trumps supercomplex any day