Mr.OrigaMichael
ORigami - play - learning
Children love Origami. Any teacher can see this when when students create paper airplanes, envelopes with little notes and any other objects using paper. Using origami to teach curricular content creates a fun and dynamic learning environment. From a neuroscientific perspective, this stimulating environment produces a greater number of neural connections across multiple regions of the brain thus enriching the learning process.
Doing origami stimulates multiple areas of students' brains. They must draw on mathematical concepts, use spacial reasoning, activate memory functions and utilise their linguistic capacities.
Whether the figures are animals or paper airplanes, students can analise and classify the figures with concepts from social and/or natural science.
With our new toy in hand, students are free to decorate their figure however they want and most importantly, PLAY with their creation. During play, the true potential of imagination and creativity are exposed.
The Fortune Teller and Howard Gardner's múltiple intelligences
Artistic:
Primary colors
Grapchic representation
Secondary colors
Naturalist
Plants
Animals
Transports
Intrapersonal
Frustration Tolerance
Perseverance
Patience
Self esteem
Linguistic
Listening & Speaking
Descriptions
Definitions
Spelling
Interpersonal
Altruism
Playing with others
Teamwork
Mathematic
Geometric Shapes
Lengths & Perimiters
Areas
Angles
Spatial
Paralell
Perpendicular
Symmetry
Abstraction
Kinesthetic
Finder Dexterity
Coloring
Coordination
The Fortune Teller is a classic origami figure which children use as a toy to play with and can even serve the teacher as an instrument for evaluation. Actually, it is the first origami figure that I started using in my Science and Arts classes. It is with this figure that I realized the power and potential that origami activities possess and from which MrOrigamichael is born. Students develop fine motor skills, use communicative capacities as well as mathematical and spacial reasoning capacities to create their origami figure. They must confront frustration and failure, as part of the learning process. Students develop perseverance while trying to complete some of the more complicated folds. Once the figure has been created, children are free to use their imagination and creativity to decorate and add an artistic as well as functional aspect to their creation.