The Geometry of Origami

12/07/2006- The Chapin School

Students became teachers on Wednesday as Laurie Mygatt's Class 5 students taught the fifth-graders from Meagan Jones' class how to make origami ornaments.

The tables in Room 36 were filled with colorful squares of paper that morphed into brilliantly patterned cubes in the hands of the girls, who were hunched next to one another making parallel fold after parallel fold.

Each girl in Ms. Mygatt's class helped a girl in Ms. Jones' class with the process. Ms. Jones, who had never made the ornaments before, also got a lesson from the girls. "What's our motto?" Ms. Mygatt asked. "The better it is, the better it is," the students responded, a tautology meant to convey that every step - from cutting the paper to tucking in the final corner - matters when it comes to the finished product. It's sound advice for math students, since each step of a math problem has to be right in order for the answer to be right.

Making the ornaments touches on many aspects of geometry, such as apexes and vertices, parallel lines and parallelograms, but also a simpler and no less important part of learning: following instructions. "We're learning to listen and look with some degree of success," Ms. Mygatt said.

The girls began with white, green and gold paper, and once they completed a cube in Chapin colors, they could move on to a spectrum of other choices.  "The multicolored ones look best," one student said as she began folding black and red paper for another ornament. Many of the ornaments made in Ms. Mygatt's and Ms. Jones' class will adorn the Christmas tree in Chapin's front hall.

"It's fun, but it's complicated," a Class 5 student said, but she was new to the task. By this time next year, she'll be a master and will be passing her skills on to another student.

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