In this tutorial, I’m going to show you how to make an easy origami turtle. For children in preschool or kindergarten/first grade, you’ll want to help. For children in the upper elementary grades, the origami project should be fine for them on their own.
Origami is great craft for kids. It has a long history with distinct paper-folding traditions arising in Europe, China, and Japan. They seem to have been mostly separate traditions until the 20th century.
In China, traditional funerals often include the burning of folded paper, most often representations of gold nuggets (yuanbao). The practice of burning paper representations instead of full-scale wood or clay replicas dates from the Sung Dynasty (905–1125 CE), though it’s not clear how much folding was involved. Traditional Chinese funeral practices were banned during the Cultural Revolution, so most of what we know about Chinese paperfolding comes from the modern-day continuation of these practices in Taiwan.
In Japan, the earliest unambiguous reference to a paper model is in a short poem by Ihara Saikaku in 1680 that mentions a traditional butterfly design used during Shinto weddings. Folding filled some ceremonial functions in Edo period Japanese culture; noshi were attached to gifts, much like greeting cards are used today. This developed into a form of entertainment; the first two instructional books published in Japan are clearly recreational.
In Europe, there was a well-developed genre of napkin-folding, which flourished during the 17th and 18th centuries.
Today, origami is popular across the world and the benefits for children is well establish. Hope you enjoy making this origami turtle!
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