I was six years old and sat in the car, reading a Rupert Bear annual, when i turned to the page that showed me how to make an origami sampan, a paper model of a little chinese boat made from a single squared sheet of paper.
I remember the countless botched efforts and wonky sheets of paper before i finally mastered it, and completed my first paper boat. And i haven’t stopped since. I still make that sampan regularly, sat on trains from the receipt for the ticket, in restaurants out of napkins, with nieces and nephews out of pages from magazines. The seemingly magical ability to create a three dimensional object out of a flat piece of paper is something that still fascinates me to this day.
There are seven basic folds in origami, and if you master them, you can have a fair crack at anything. From an early age it taught me that even seemingly impossible tasks can generally be broken down into simple steps and that some of those steps are reusable for lots of different things.
The blog is on holiday this week, so we hope you enjoy our Five Words about Learning.
julianstodd
Julian Stodd's Learning Blog 