Making Origami Paper Boats

We had so much fun making Paper Boats the other weekend.  My daughter then continued to make them all week long.  She tends to find an idea like this and is so proud that she can make it and wants to show off to friends and family.  We got the idea from the book: Curious George Rides a Bikeby H.L. Rey which has the instructions on how to create a paper boat within the story. This activity is great because it ties in reading and art together.

To create a paper boat you'll need:
Origami Paperor thin paper that is easy to fold

Here are the instructions we followed within the book.  It begins with the paper hat.  Here are instructions for the origami paper boat here at: http://www.origami-fun.com/origami-boat.html

We had so much fun with these!

We even did some floating experiments with the origami boats we made too.

Available at Amazon.com if you click on the icons below:

      

Origami Christmas Trees

We created some origami Christmas trees! I thought they turned out pretty cute and C especially enjoyed decorating them. Here is her finished origami tree!

We used about a 9 inch square piece of construction paper,  but if you have origami paper or thinner paper that may work a little easier! I found some metallic origami paper here, which would be really pretty for X-mas!!!

 1. The first step is to position the paper like a diamond.

2. Then fold like this.

3. Open it back up.

4. Then, fold both sides to meet the center crease....this is the kite base in Origami terminology.

5. Now fold up the bottom point.

6. Fold that bottom point (from above) a little more than half way down.

7. Then, fold bottom point to meet the fold above. I stapled it at that point because with construction paper it kept popping out of shape.  If you use origami paper or a thinner paper you wouldn't have to staple it!

Turn it over... and time to decorate!!!

This was C's favorite part! Who doesn't love glitter, sequins and spangles?  The children in my art class considered them gold and treasure! Notice I forgot to put newspaper down?... and glitter is everywhere on our kitchen table now!  We just used dots of glue for the spangles.  We added yellow paper stars.

Here is C's tree again!

Here is mine! 

Stay tuned for some more X-mas tree projects in the coming weeks!!!

Check out all these Different Origami Christmas Tree ideas from my Google image search here! (You'll be inspired!...I am!)

Origami Butterflies

We created simple origami butterflies!  Origami is the traditional Japanese art of paper folding in which no cutting or gluing is used. We used one small cut...so I guess this is not a traditional model, but it was in an origami book! This simple model for a butterfly was found in the book: Origami Magic by Florence Temko. Cassie did a pretty good job following the steps,  considering the complexity of this so called "simple" model. Here is one of her finished butterflies that she decorated with a black marker.  She really did enjoy this and became quite prolific as you will see in the end of this post.  I will show the steps below.  I found a similar origami butterfly here if you want to check that one out too!

Step 1....start with a square paper and fold on this line.

Step 2...it should look like this when folded.

Step 3...fold in half.

Step 5...open up  and cut where I drew the black line. (I did this so C would know where to cut!)

Step 6...fold it back on the crease where the cut is made.  Fold a little over on the side with the cut. This will become the body.  Make the fold on the corner with no cut.

Step 7...open back to inverted triangle and the the middle part becomes the body.

Decorate if desired!

Finished origami butterfly! You can see we added some facts to our project! (book underneath!)

C had lots of fun playing with all her origami butterflies! She made quite a few!

This post is linked to:
Sunday Showcase
It's Playtime