It may not seem that way to an outsider, but I lead a pretty awesome life.
After school today, I met two colleagues and friends of mine (Ashley and the other Ivy) at Dunn Brothers to do some prep work for a lesson I want to do with my fourth graders tomorrow. This lesson includes making an origami box, and with no origami experience at all, I naturally turned to the internet for guidance. I printed two different kinds of boxes, grabbed some construction paper, two rulers, some pencil nubs off my desk, and some kiddie scissors and headed off for some coffee.
Those of you that know me know that I shouldn't be allowed to do art projects. Between my lack of fine motor skills and just my general clumsiness, I usually end up with more paper glued to myself than the project or more needle holes in my finger than in the fabric. Nonetheless, I insist of persisting. It took all three of us, Ashley, Other Ivy, and myself, but we managed to make a basic box AND the star box. There was a lot of "smack talk" and grumbling, but we won!
All day long, the three of us preach and nag about positive attitudes, respectful interactions, doing your best, and working together. I'm sure we attracted a lot of attention during the first chunk of our time, where our boxes refused to be boxes. "This is dumb!" "This doesn't make any sense!" "This is stupid!" "No! You're stupid!" "My box at least looks more like a box than your box!", and other such un-positive attitude comments escaped from all three of us. There was cursing, muttering, banging the crumpled paper on the table, throwing things aside, and general disrespect for ourselves, others, and our place. (If you work where I work, you will understand the last part of that comment.) But in the end, with our combined stubborness and some effective teamwork, as well as using our words, we conquered the origami directions!
Three cheers for us!
Then I went home and had popcorn and did laundry. I also worked for quite some time on the prototype for my mitten project. It is my intent to turn regular mittens into dragon mittens for two of my friends for Christmas. This is proving to be more difficult than it should be, but not more difficult than I anticipated. And after the origami star box, I have faith in myself!
When I'm not too lazy to go dig out the camera and download pictures, I will take some pictures of my boxes (I am very proud) and of the dragon mitten prototype. Or maybe you'll see me walking around wearing them.
No comments:
Post a Comment