You never know...

When we got together back in March to learn how to do origami boxes, it never ocurred to me that, one day, I'd be passing on what I'd learned to some classes of high school art students. Hey, I'm happily retired with more than 35 years of working in education behind me, so why would I want to be in front of a classroom full of kids again? But that's exactly what occurred yesterday!

Here's how it happened: Back in March I posted some photos of our origami session on my Facebook page. Recently, one of my FB friends, Kristin Duncan, who teaches art at Central, contacted me to tell me she'd seen the photos of the boxes and to ask if I'd teach her Basic Art students how to make the boxes. She said that the last section her students were going to study was form. She was trying to think of a fun, quick (and cheap) activity to do with them and she thought they would LOVE to make the boxes. She especially wanted to do something fun that they could do with their hands because it would be the last week of school and students tend to get antsy around that time. After some serious consideration (I wasn't the best learner when Melinda was teaching us!), I agreed and that's how I ended up teaching the skill to her 2 Basic Art classes at Central High School yesterday.

The kids were great! Not only were they polite and attentive, but they were also quite enthusiastic and seemed to be enjoying it a lot! Using pages from calendars donated by the Caribbean Museum Center for the Arts, my lesson was to teach them how to make a 4" square box with a lid. Half way through the 90 minute period I noticed that many of the students had proceeded on to adapting what I'd taught them to making smaller and even mini boxes! I didn't even know how to do that!

They helped each other and eagerly displayed their end products: All of them successfull made several 4" boxes, with lids. Quite a few of them went on to make mini-boxes, some no bigger than my thumb! One boy had gotten some ribbon and hung his lidded box from his backpack. Another decorated his box with some teeny flowers he'd found in the room. Still another made 4 mini-boxes that fit perfectly into his 4" box, making it a perfect place to store jewelry!

I was really impressed! Most important, the kids had fun and I did too! Ginger >