Giant Tacky Origami Book Character Holiday Shirts

 

A co-worker and I are working with students the week before our holiday break to create these fun tacky book character holiday shirts. 

I've seen and created origami shirts in the past and hadn't really thought of them recently until I saw this cool video on how to make a GIANT origami shirt. 

I liked the idea of creating a tacky holiday shirt but needed to make the project a bit more academic. My co-worker, a former ELA teacher, suggested adding book character elements in addition to the holiday elements and having students explain their choices in writing. It was such a genius idea that we made a couple of samples.

We plan to work with a class so we brainstormed the requirements as we created the shirts.

Students would need to work in pairs to complete the folding of the shirt. The instructor in the video did it by herself, and I tried, but it was really nice to have a second pair of hands. While we were working we thought students should be paired together by different book characters. In our sample we used the book "Charlotte's Web". My co-worker picked Charlotte as her character and I picked Fern. We came up with five items that would work for each character and discussed what it represented about them. We both liked the collaborative element of folding the shirts and talking/rough draft writing out the five elements because the drawing and writing were going to be solo activities. Collaboration also fit nicely into some of the academic standards we were addressing with this project. 

In the writing piece we wanted student to think beyond the basic "I drew a stool because Fern sat on one in the book" and more about what sitting on stool day after day told us about Fern's character. This was my sample writing piece justifying my elements (the write up will done in Google Docs and printed and taped to the back of the shirt...but also could be hand written on a sheet of paper).

To bring in the holiday element we were requiring a minimum of five illustrations to be woven in among the book elements. 

My co-worker isn't very crafty so I drew the icons/elements representing both characters based off our lists. I am not very good at drawing items from my head and used The Noun Project for inspiration. The Noun Project is a site full of simple easily duplicatable icons. It is free to search which is all we are using the site for. I actually have, and love, the paid educator version ($20 for the year) since I make a lot of graphics for work.

We suspect this project will take two to three class periods to complete depending on the length of the ELA block. 

This is the problem we are anticipating:

We aren't sure if we will have enough white bulletin board paper for each student (the school we are working with had much less white paper than pictured on this roll). We think we will need to pull a mix of white, yellow, pink, and blue (all light colors...needed so the coloring part will show up) and let students choose the color they want to work with.

You can use large size paper instead of bulletin board paper if that is an issue at your school or you are dealing with a large number of students (it needs to be larger than 8.5 x 11, which will be too small...Staples should have some options to choose from). The shirts will just be smaller than the shown samples. You can also pair up students to work on one shirt so you only need one sheet per two students. 

Smaller version made with 11x17 paper

Physical Supplies Needed (large shirt)

- 5 feet, per student, of light colored bulletin board paper (we approximated the length with the floor tiles)

- Black sharpies (needed for outlining)

- Colored pencils

The technology components to this project are: Learning YouTube tips and tricks for playing videos, introduction to and navigating The Noun Project, and writing in Google Docs. 

My tips for this project:

- Make sure students understand that they have to draw their icons LARGE since they have a lot of area on the shirt to cover. 

- They should use a pencil to sketch everything out FIRST before tracing over with black.

- Have some stand alone erasers available for students. (I wore down my pencil eraser)

- Have some mini pencil sharpeners available. (I wore down my colored pencils pretty quickly while coloring in)

Updated 12/16/21 Finished Student Projects and Write Up

If you try this with students this holiday season I would LOVE to see them. Feel free to comment or tag me on Twitter @atechcoachlife.