Educational Origami: Japanese Paper Folding - Activity Instruction Book

by Vanessa M (follow)

Educational Origami: Japanese Paper Folding is only twelve pages long, so it's best treated as an introduction to origami. Indeed, none of the creations you can make with this book are very difficult and they are all between five and fifteen steps long (five steps for a mushroom and fifteen for morning glory).

There are twelve different creations in the book, with each getting its own page. As well as the mushroom and morning glory, you can also learn how to make an organ, a boat, a balloon, a box, a dove, a pig, a whale, a jumping frog, a crab and a rooster (I was a bit surprised that there was nothing about a crane).

The instructions for each creation take the form of coloured diagrams, with a picture to correspond with each step. There isn't much text, so you're largely left to try and interpret the dotted lines and arrows which signal where to fold the paper, and in what direction.

The steps are generally very easy, but there were a few I struggled to interpret. However, if you look at the picture which corresponds to the next step, you can see what your paper should end up looking like and just work out what you need to do from there.

For some of the creations, there is more involved than just folding paper. Sometimes you need scissors to cut a tail or round the edges of the mushroom. Pencils are required for eyes too (except for the crab, where matches are used).

If you buy the book new, it will come with a small stack origami paper about 15 centimetres by 15 centimetres. Each piece is coloured on one side and white on the other, with the different sides making it easy to interpret the instructions.





When you run out of this paper, I found a useful replacement to be the small squares that you get in notepads that are shaped like spirals. This paper is already the right shape and often comes in different colours (though usually with the colour on both sides). It is smaller than typical origami paper though.

I've tried to make quite a few of the origami creations in Educational Origami: Japanese Paper Folding by now and so far I've had a lot of success.







However, there's only so much you can do with this book. It's more of a stepping stone towards more advanced origami, but it would be perfect for kids and some of the creations would make particularly good decorations for cards.

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