Our Origami Wish Tree For The Global Traveling Mural Project....A Special Collaborative Project At Van Meter

 

One of our favorite collaborative projects every year is the Global Traveling Mural Project.  You can read about it here in this post. 

This year, our related arts team is collaborating on the Global Traveling Mural Project at Van Meter.  We decided to to go with a Wish Tree theme with Zentangle trees, origami hearts with pockets and little handwritten wishes from all of our students and teachers that we will be sending around the world with the mural pieces.

Here is how this collaboration works and what they are doing in the library, in S.T.E.A.M. and with our guidance counselor.

In the library, my library partner Brittany Marks and I are working with the 3rd-5th graders on the origami part of the project. 

In the Van Meter Origami Wish Tree Global Mural Project Choice Board here, I first added a video that I created to help kick off the project. 

In the video, I start out by sharing what Wish Trees are and showed them a few that my family and I saw when we traveled to India and Hong Kong. 

I also talked about the ideas around the mural and showed them a few pictures I found online to get them thinking about the feel of the mural. 

Next in the choice board, there are two places they can go to learn how to make an origami pocket heart. 

I found the instructions for the Pocket Heart in the Capstone eBook, Easy Holiday Origami and grabbed the cover image and link from Capstone Connect. 

Lastly, the choice board explained how they would be writing a wish to others on a skinny slip of paper and folding it up to put inside of the hearts.  Once our mural is complete, the kids will help us hang the hearts on the trees like leaves and add them to the packages being sent to the other schools and libraries. 

You will find the choice board here to share with students and here if you would like to make edits to use with your school community.

After Brittney shared the video, choice board and talked about the Global Mural Project, the students got to work by...

...selecting origami paper and...

...watching the video and eBook...

...to learn how to fold their origami hearts. 

She had each class during the four week rotation make several hearts so we lots of extras for our little ones to have a heart to add their wish to with Sara Cook, our school counselor. 

In this next related arts rotation, all of the grades TK-5th will be contributing to the actual mural part of the project in S.T.E.A.M. 

Our S.T.E.A.M. teacher, Megan Algreen, and I will be collaborating on this part. We will be teaching them about Zentangle and giving all of them a change to draw and color within the ten Zentangle trees that will be part of the ten pieces of the mural. 

We kick this part off next week so I will share more in another blog post at the end of the week. 

If you would like to be part of the Global Traveling Mural Project, there is still time for you and your community to join.  You can join one of the Groups in this Google Doc. 

We are so excited about our mural and can't wait to send our wish trees out into the world.