Today I taught the last of several origami workshops for I have been teaching over the past week at the local elementary school. It has been an amazing experience. First, it is so much fun to teach this year because I know so many of children so well. Second it has been fun to see what happens when I when I teach all of the classes in the fifth grade. There is an enthusiasm about the origami that is contagious and it has been a pleasure to watch. The other nice thing is the response I have received from parents. Parents keep coming up to me and telling me how excited their children were by what I taught them and how they carried that enthusiasm home. A few have gone so far as to tell me it is the most exciting thing the kids have done so far this year.



This year more than any other I was especially pleased about how the workshop went. I created a handout to help the children make the units after I walked them through the first unit. And I spent more time than usual talking about math, art and origami at the beginning. In my final class there was a little boy who had already created a modular origami item. I figured that he would probably end up being my assistant and not learn that much in the hour I was there. I was wrong. Although he had created this structure he was doing so mostly without thinking, and through my workshop gained a much greater understanding of the math involved.

My only disappointment was that the most of the teachers did not seem ready when I left to take the children's enthusiasm and expand on it. So I am now working on a hand out to give them to help them figure out how they can incorporate what I taught into lessons that they may have later in the year with mathematics.