Origami Bulletin Board

I have a new bulletin board in my classroom – an origami bulletin board! I love that it can be used by both students and myself to showcase our origami creations.

A couple of months ago, I finally got around to switching out a long overdue bulletin board in my classroom. After our school building shut down last spring, I was given only a limited amount of time to close up my classroom for summer. Instead of taking down posters/bulletin boards like I normally do, I just left everything up. I didn’t know if I would even be given time to decorate my room before school started again in the fall.

As a result, I ended up keeping the exact same bulletin board from last year up for the entire first semester of this year as well.

In a weird turn of events that involved a bunch of quarantining and a pivot to virtual learning for a few weeks, my school ended up cancelling our semester tests in January. My principal encouraged us to treat this last week of the semester as the first week of school since it had been so long since we had interacted with our students face-to-face due to the overlap of our going virtual for two plus weeks with our two week long Christmas Break.

I decided to incorporate some origami into our classroom time. I love doing origami with students, and it was nice to bring back a hands-on element to my classroom. Doing everything virtually has been extremely hard for me because most of my go-to activities involve things that aren’t permitted during a pandemic.

I posted a link to how to make a sonobe origami unit on google classroom. Soon, we were constructing tetrahedrons, cubes, colliding cubes, and octahedrons.

A few of my students used this as an opportunity to create some origami objects that they had learned how to create elsewhere. Soon these origami “gifts” were piling up on my desk. I decided to empty off my bulletin board and use it as a place to highlight student origami.

There are only three pieces on it so far, but I hope that it encourages other students to explore some origami. Annoyingly, I had students create a lot more origami than this, but modular origami does not really lend itself to being displayed on a bulletin board.

We explored making tetrahedrons (Toshie’s Jewel) with varying sizes of square paper. The first is made with 8.5″ squares. The second is made with 2.5″ squares (off-cuts from making the first). The final one was made by a student with a 1 inch squares.

Two other students set off to create a 60 piece sonobe creation. They didn’t exactly end up with the shape that they were expecting.

Check out the side view.

I’d forgotten just how much of a mess my room becomes when I do origami. It’s worth it, though.

I think I want to try my hand at trying out some new origami models myself to add to my bulletin board. Hopefully seeing what is possible will inspire even more students to try out origami for themselves.

In the future, I would like to create my own origami tutorial bulletin board that has printed instructions for students to grab so they can easily try to recreate the origami models for themselves.