Educating a child is a cornerstone of good childcare. Given that your child is going to be away from you for a large part of the day, childcare is where they’re going to be learning a lot in their formative years, before they enter the schooling system properly. There are many different things that your child will learn during their time in childcare, one of the resources that childcare educators tend to draw on is the presence of “origami”, or the art of paper folding. You might not think that origami has any practical benefit in a childcare setting – but here’s how it can help your child.
Origami Stimulates Your Child’s Brain
There’s a reason why origami is a key part of the Japanese curriculum in elementary schooling, both the hands-on and hands-off nature of origami helps to stimulate your child’s brain. It improves certain key brain functions like the development of mathematical skills – including the ability to recognize and repeat a sequence or pattern, it also improves memory function as the children are made to recall the steps they’ve seen to recreate the origami pattern.
It Improves Hand-Eye Coordination Skills
Hand-eye coordination might be something that your child is lacking. For this, origami is a great way to develop these skills. It forces your child to think about how they’re folding the paper and the way in which they’re going to achieve the desired shape. This will allow them to make reasonable judgements based on memory recall and then executing the folds of the paper to achieve the desired result.
Origami Teaches Teamwork
Your child’s educator may begin by having the children work individually to get the hand of origami before pairing them up with others to create larger pieces of origami! This aspect of origami, where larger pieces are at play, will teach your child social skills – like working with others in a team to create a specific shape or object.
One of the First Introductions to Geometry & Shapes
Outside of learning about your basic shapes as a mathematics exercise, origami is one of the first practical introductions that children typically have to geometry and how shapes work in conjunction with other shapes to form objects. It’s a basic form of the creation of artwork. Creating boats, for example, or flamingos or other birds that can follow basic geometric patterns as a part of origami artwork.
Origami Encourages Analysis
One of the best things that origami can do for a young child is to improve their analytical skills. It forces the child to see a desired origami shape, take a step back, think and process what they’ve seen and then think about how best to recreate it. Every fold of the paper should require analysis of how it affects the overall shape being created. To this end, origami also teaches patience and improves motor skills, as the children are working with both hands.
If you’re a parent living in Mount Gambier, or elsewhere in Australia, and are looking to enrol your child in childcare, make sure you do your research. You’ll want to pay a visit to the facility first, to ensure that both you and your child are comfortable there and that the facility is teaching your child the building blocks of learning. Origami is one such method of teaching children multiple things at once. Have a conversation with your childcare educator about if origami is taught and how it might benefit your child.
