Like so many conferences, festivals, and other events, World Origami Days has gone virtual this year. Beginning on October 24, the birthday of Lillian Oppenheimer (1898-1992), who founded the first origami group in the USA and was one of the founders of OrigamiUSA and the British Origami Society, this event will host workshops and tutorials
A local museum is hosting an exhibit entitled "Origami in the Garden" until March of 2019. It's a fantastic series of metal sculptures based on origami designs scattered throughout the gardens of the museum. As part of the exhibit's kick-off activities, Michael LaFosse and Richard Alexander, master origamists, were invited to visit local schools
On Monday, we celebrated America's birthday with some STEM activities! As always, we started with some reading, and I intentionally chose books that included images of fireworks. I also included a number of non-fiction Independence Day titles in my book display, along with this title: We started by reading A is for America, by Devin
I know International Peace Day seems like a long way off, but when you're planning to string 1000 cranes contributed from folders all over the world to display in locations equally as diverse, you can never start too early. The United Nation's International Day of Peace is every September 21. This year,
Fate is a funny thing. A few months ago I got ambitious one week, and wrote and published ( I thought) three blog articles. Unbeknownst to me, it was the same week that the STAR_Net blog was being moved to its new home on this website. For some reason, one of my articles made the
Last week my Crafternoon participants (with a few moms and one teen-aged sister included) enjoyed a paper plane tournament. It was a wonderful, low cost, quick prep program which everyone enjoyed thoroughly. I collected all the paper airplane books that my library system owned, added quite a few that I bought online, and had them laid
After talking about water (and possibly wetlands) with the Lake activity in the previous lesson, why not move on to the life cycle of the frog? Most kids find frogs and their metamorphosis to be fascinating, and this lesson includes an easy and fun 3D chart of the life cycle. Start with some great books!
Since working as a librarian, I have found that children love origami. I think they love being able to create something with just paper. At my present library, we do not have a lot of money to use towards STEM related projects, so I try blend STEM inspired ideas into the crafts and projects that
