Combining things I Love--iPads and mentoring through origami

You need to be an engineer to figure this out!

I picked up Alana today, and after enduring the heat and mosquitoes at the Botanical Garden, we relaxed at home---my daughter, Andorra, joined us for video games, dinner, and last--origami.  I've never been that good at origami.  The diagrams for making even a simple box look like the blueprint for a space shuttle.  After struggling a bit, Andorra taught the two of us to make paper cranes, but the challenge was making something from a written diagram.  Enter iPad and YouTube.  I discovered that there are about 20000 videos of origami instruction on YouTube, and following an actual visual demonstration was incredibly easier than the hieroglyphic-looking instructions. The iPad was conveniently placed exactly in front of the girls and the video could be stopped at crucial folding moments. The end results were a couple of cute envelopes! (Andorra then gave a lesson to Alana on addressing and stamping an envelope with plans to mail notes to each other later this week!)  We'll do some more origami tomorrow!

Check out the origami envelopes! We're mailing each other notes soon.

If I were to apply this to teaching and education, the application is obvious!   Hand-on, real life modeling is achievable these days with multimedia, and kids really learn from it.

We made penguins the next day!  And frogs.