Starting an Origami club

Recently I started an origami club at Cedar Valley Middle school, where you can teach, learn, or just do origami. We have about 7 to 8 members who come every week. Every meeting someone who wants to teaches something to the people who want to learn it. We also have designing challenges

A friend named Om helped me start the club, and together we asked teachers and members of the front office what we needed to do in order to start the club. What they suggested we do is write a paper with all the information and get a teacher who is willing to be our sponsor. The paper was easy, but we had trouble with finding a sponsor because all of the teachers politely said no. Mrs. Sur however was a huge help and even though she couldn't be our sponsor, (She already was the sponsor for three other clubs and had tutorials.) she helped us find a teacher willing to be our sponsor. We also had several people who wanted to be in the club try to find if one of their teachers was interested and would like more information. After a while Mrs. Rogers, a WC and LA teacher said yes, and we had our first meeting on Wednesday.

Our first meeting was a huge success, 7 people came and we taught the following things: A transforming ninja star, which is an eight piece frisbee/ninja star, a firework, which is also eight pieces (someone tried successfully to make a 12 piece one), and a flapping bird which is one piece. I was extremely happy we could do with the little time we had, since for some members it was their first time doing origami!

In fact, people liked doing origami so much that some people (not all of them were in the club, and this was a minor problem before the club started) that they started to do origami in class, which got some of the teachers really mad. So mad in fact that one of them, Mrs. Ebers, threatened to talk to Mrs. Rogers and shut down the club. Thankfully this never happened, but it came awfully close. Mrs. Ebers has all of the origami people gave to her, and some origami that she confiscated, put on her white board, and total it covers about 1/5 of her board, which by no means was small.

One down side to starting the club so late in the year we couldn't do ALL the stuff we wanted to do, like put club news on announcements and getting paper from the school (it might happen next year), but we still have a HUGE blast teaching and learning origami.