Stronger Connections Mini Session | Paper & Presence – A Guided Origami Session Transcript

Laura Buckner:

Hello and welcome everyone. We’ve got a little bit of welcome music. Before we get started today, if you could take a moment to please find a piece of paper. We’re going to be doing some guided origami. So if you’re able to just step away for a moment, please do find a piece of paper and then come right back and we’ll get started in just a moment. We’re so glad to have you all here with us today. Thanks so much.

Okay. Welcome everyone to our wellness mini session. Today’s topic is Paper and Presence, a guided origami session. As I mentioned, if you’re just arriving, please take a few moments. I’m going to be going over some intro information, but please step away and grab a piece of paper because you are going to be using it for today’s session. So again, welcome. This mini-session is hosted by the California Stronger Connections Technical Assistance Center.

We provide support to local educational agencies to foster safe, healthy, and supportive learning environments, and that includes taking some time for self-care and sharing a few things that you learn with other folks. And so that’s what we’re all doing here today. I want to welcome our presenter from Kern County Superintendent of Schools. Natalie is a prevention services facilitator, and she provides support to districts and schools to improve attendance, enhance school safety, and promote student mental health. Working with the school community partnerships and whole child framework, she specializes in family outreach and parenting education. She facilitates professional development and training for districts and schools. And through classes and community engagement, she raises awareness and shares evidence-based practices designed to strengthen relationships between family and schools.

So we’re so thrilled to have Natalie here with us today. I’m going to go ahead and stop sharing my screen. And Natalie, you can take us through this guided practice today. Thank you so much.

Natalie Echeverria :

Thank you, Laura. Okay, awesome. So welcome everyone. I’m Natalie, as Laura introduced me. I am so happy you are here. Let’s go ahead and get started. So why Origami can be a great meditation? It promotes mindfulness, bringing attention to the precision and repetitive movements. And you can practice it anywhere. I’m in a room. You guys are probably at your desk, at a school site somewhere, but it’s easily accessible to engage in this mindfulness. It’ll help you focus attention and introduce yourself into that flow state and just let stress kind of fade gradually. The touch and the site and the movements are a good calming activity for you.

And again, we can do it anywhere at a school site. It can be a good behavior regulation or some positive classroom interventions. So let’s get started. Does everyone have a piece of paper? And it should be just a regular standard printer paper. And we will need to make it into a square, so I’ll go ahead and give a quick tip on how to do that. Just fold it over to the corner. If you were young and passed notes in class, you remember this fold. We’ll fold it like that. And the tail end at the bottom is where we’re going to remove. So if you have some scissors handy, go ahead and cut it off. If you need to just fold it over and make it easy to cut off at the edge of a desk, do that as well. But after you do that, we will have a square. And so all origami starts with a square base.

We’ll take a moment to do that. Make sure we’re comfortable. If you need to, take a deep breath in through your nose and out through your mouth. And if we’re ready, we can move on to the next step. Okay. So we’re going to create all of the creases you see on number one. So we’re going to fold it diagonally in both directions and then also in half in both directions. So we’ll be doing all of those creases. And just take your time. Feel the way the paper folds and creases. A nice sharp crease helps throughout the steps that you move forward.

And once you have all of your creases, then we’ll be able to move forward with the next steps. So I’m still doing mine. And let your attention settle here. There’s nothing to rush. This is a mindful activity. Take your time. Okay. So once you have all of your creases, it should look something like this. Now, we’re going to go to step two and just fold it back over into a triangle. And from this step, we’re going to tuck in the tail ends and kind of let that fold over into itself and tuck that in on both sides. So we’ll create a square base.

We should have something like this. So once you tucked in the sides from your triangle on both ends, you will have a square base. Now, lining up the corners is really important because it will have an easier fold as you progress. So let me kind of fix mine a little. Okay. So now we’re on step four. So from this, you’ll have all of your open edges pointed down and we’re going to fold in the sides inward like a kite on both sides. Okay. Are there any questions, anyone kind of stuck somewhere? Once you’ve folded in the sides, it should look like this. And we will repeat that on the other side. So fold inward to that center line.

Laura Buckner:

Someone’s asking for you to show that step one more time.

Natalie Echeverria :

Of course. So from your square base with all of your loose ends at the bottom, you’re going to fold in the corners. If you could see the image on the slide, number four is where we’re at. So we’re going to fold in the corners to that center line, and it’ll look like this. And we will repeat that on the other side. So once you’ve done the other side, it should look kind of like a kite, has a kite shape. Okay?

Now we’re going to take the top triangle and we’re just going to fold it downward in both directions. And this is just creating a crease again for the next step to be easier. So just fold it back and forth to get a nice crease. If your mind wanders, gently breathe, bring yourself back to the paper. Notice what your hands are doing, and we’ll be here at this step. Okay? Is everyone ready to move forward? Okay. Let’s move to step seven. Now, there’s 20 steps… I’m just kidding. So we’re at step seven. We’re going to open our little flaps we just made.

Now, this will seem a little tricky, but we’re going to grab the tip of the paper, kind of open it up. And so that crease we made with the triangle is going to help our paper make that shape, and we’re going to open it up and kind of flatten that down into a long diamond. Okay? We should be here at this step. This is number eight. And our two loose edges should be at the bottom. And then after the diamond, we will repeat that on the other side.

Sorry, I had a little mishap. I had to fix it. As I said, I’m not an expert. I just thought this would be really fun to do. So once we have our diamond shapes for both ends, your two tail ends should be at the bottom, like on figure eight. Okay? So once we’re at this step, we’re going to do another little inward fold. So we’re going to take our corner and put it to the center line, and we’re going to do that on both sides. So that is number nine, step nine.

And if a mistake happens, just pause, bring yourself back to it like I just had to do, and it’s perfectly fine. Just keep on going. So it should look like this once you pulled it in those corners. Okay? And again, the tail ends are still at the bottom, and we will now repeat that on the other side again. Then you will be with this shape. Is everyone here? We’re all good? Okay. Let’s go to the next step. So from here, we have these folded edges. We’re going to just close it over onto itself. So we’ll have the folded edges touching. Okay? So it’ll look like this.

And so where you folded the edge over, now you have this flat side, and you’re going to grab that tail and flip it up. Okay? So that would be step 11 if you’re looking at the slide. So we have our tail flipped up. Now we’re going to sandwich that closed. We’re just going to fold that over. And on the other side where we have that same flat side, we’re going to flip that tail up and sandwich that closed. So we flip that tail up and sandwich that close. So now we should be looking at something like this, almost like a little sailboat.

Okay? Are we good here? Anyone stuck? We’re all good. Okay. So now we’re almost at the finish line. We’ll take the little tails we tucked in and kind of angle them out and kind of squish it down. And these will be our neck and tail. So we’ll look at something like this. Now, to create the head, pick whatever side you’d like and just kind of bend it down like that. And again, just give it a little squish so it forms the head. And we’re almost done. Now we will fold down and form the wings. So just fold it down on both sides. And now you have a paper crane.

You can fluff it up a little if you want to kind of expand it, and it’ll sit nicely on your desk and you have a nice little crane. So congratulations. You just engaged in active mindfulness. Our mind and brain was able to take a break from maybe whatever deadline might be happening or lesson plans you might need to create, but you were able to engage in something hands-on and kind of distract yourself and create something awesome. So was there anything you noticed while creating this? Did our mind wander? Were we able to be present in the moment? How did it feel? I don’t have access to the chat while I’m presenting. I can’t see it, so I don’t know if anyone said anything.

Laura Buckner:

Natalie, I saw one person wrote, “Something went off kilter for me, but I’ll just roll with the flow, which I feel like is potentially part of the practice and what we’re trying to achieve as well.” Someone else said, “I found your voice and guidance to be relaxing during the exercise.” And yes, we will share the handout as well. And I’ll say for my part, it absolutely did take my focus onto the paper and away from anything else that I was thinking of. So just thank you so much for providing us with a little bit of a break.

Natalie Echeverria :

Awesome. Thank you, Laura.

Laura Buckner:

Yeah. Okay. I wanted to just take a moment and share that there’s a couple of links you can download a few of the handouts that Natalie has shared with us and also those origami instructions if you’d like to try again and try it with a group if you’d like to or see how it lands in another session. So there’s some links right here in the chat. Again, this was Natalie from Kern County Superintendent of Schools. Thank you so much for spending some time and walking us through this Guided Origami practice. I do just briefly want to share that you can learn more about the Stronger Connections Technical Assistance Center on our website. There’s the QR code right here. There’s a very, very brief poll. We’d love to hear how this landed for you, and if you have any suggestions for how we can deliver future mini mindfulness sessions, we’d love to hear them.

And finally, just to thank everybody so much for spending some time with us today. We hope that you learned a little something, were able to take a little bit of a break and can go out and have a wonderful afternoon. So thank you again, everyone. Have a great evening.