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[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"40156","attributes":{"class":"media-image","typeof":"foaf:Image","style":"","alt":"Origami"}}]]This post was written by Children's Museum Blog Ambassador Katie White! Follow Katie's posts on the blog or follow her on Twitter @katieunscripted.
I’m not gonna lie – making all four of my kids (ages 17 months to 12 years) happy in one trip to The Children’s Museum is not easy. While the baby is almost always content with just being allowed out of the stroller, the other three often don’t agree on what exhibits to squeeze into our standard 2-hour visit. (We live really close so short visits are best for us since it’s about all the baby can handle at this point.)
The one exhibit they always agree on is Take Me There: China. Being able to take a 2 minute plane ride and wind up in China is pretty amazing. They love learning to write Chinese characters, dressing up in the Opera House, shopping at the market and caring for the pandas. But the best part for me is that they are learning about a culture that is over 7,000 miles away. A culture that I will most likely never be able to take them to visit.
Because our museum trips are often short, we might spend the entire visit in the China exhibit. Since I’m often pulled between chasing the baby and figuring out where the other three are, I miss out on intentionally immersing ourselves in each area of the exhibit and reading all the little details about the culture and history of the Chinese people.
[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"40157","attributes":{"class":"media-image","typeof":"foaf:Image","style":"","alt":"Plane"}}]] [[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"40158","attributes":{"class":"media-image","typeof":"foaf:Image","style":"","alt":"Calligraphy"}}]][[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"40159","attributes":{"class":"media-image","typeof":"foaf:Image","style":"","alt":"Opera House"}}]]
So this month I decided to focus on bringing a piece of this culture only to Lucas, who is almost four. The last time he was at the China exhibit, he was completely taken with an instruction in origami. So we walked to the closest library branch last week and checked out seven origami books, from Thanksgiving to dinosaurs to an origami army.
We started with Folding for Fun: Origami for Ages 4 and Up by Didier Boursin. SUPER smart idea, because holy cow! Origami is hard! But we had a blast, making bunnies whose ears moved and noise makers that Lucas could figure out better than I could.
We’ll slowly fold our way through each of the books, I’m sure. I’ve found that he loves transforming a simple sheet of paper into something even as simple as a bunny. But Lucas has big ideas, so he has already decided that later this week we need to make origami army tents. And we must make origami dinosaurs to smash those tents.
Of course we do.
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