Finding ways to boost wellbeing and feel good at home are imperative towards maintaining healthy bodies and minds.

Getting creative with the kids is a great way to keep them entertained for hours and help their imaginations continue to run wild while staying at home. Over the course of our closure, we'll be sharing quick and easy-to-follow guides for fun family crafts using bits and pieces from around the house.

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Origami is the art of paper folding. It comes from the Japanese ori meaning ‘folding’ and kami meaning ‘paper’. Using a series of folds and creases, any number of paper sculptures can be created. Why not give one of our sculptures a go to get you started? The boat is the easiest, then the grasshopper, and if you really want a challenge try the flapping bird! It will be easier with larger pieces of paper, but A4 should be fine.

Let’s get started:

Equipment needed:

• Paper – any size, but A4 works well. (You could use a page from a magazine, or decorate your piece of paper first, or just plain paper, whatever you have around the house!)
• Scissors (to cut paper down to a square shape if needed)

Instructions

Download or print one of three instruction guides to create either a boat, a flapping bird or a grasshopper:

Build a Boat
Fold a Flapping Bird
Make a Grasshopper

The paper shape needed for each item is shown at the top of the instruction sheet. So is the difficulty level: one spot for easy, three spots for hard. The boat needs a rectangular piece of paper - A4 works really well - but the flapping bird and the grasshopper both start using square paper.

  

To make a rectangular piece of paper square, fold one corner across the paper to line the top edge with the side edge of the paper. You can trim off the extra paper and you are left with a square of paper folded in half diagonally. Open it out and flatten before following the instructions on the sheet.

Remember, origami is about folding accurately, so take your time and make sure the edges and corners line up as you fold, it will make it a lot easier as you go along if you have folded accurately from the beginning. 

If you’ve been inspired, there are loads of tutorials and videos online – what else can you make using origami? Perhaps you could create whole origami worlds and use them to make your own stopmotion animation.