VCOP Origami
Fortunes belong in cookies. Everybody knows that. The traditional origami fortune teller is much better suited as an Origami VCOP Sentence Maker! This page will show you how to make one. All you need is a printer, a piece of paper, a pair of scissors and a pen. And lots of patience, you will need lots of patience as well...
First, click on the template below, print the picture, and neatly cut it out.
Next, you need to add the information to the Sentence Maker. You could decide upon four openers and write them in the four corner squares. Connectives could go in the small triangles, eight of them in all. Finally, you could write eight different 'Wow Words' in the eight large triangles in the middle. You don't have to follow this advice, you could experiment with the four skills of writing and see what you come up with. Below is an illustation showing one possible way of organising the sentence ingredients.
And here is one example of a finished template.
You'll be glad to hear that the easy part is now finished. Next comes the challenging task of actually making the thing. I'll try my best to explain the process here, and then I'll direct you to other sites on the net which may well explain the instructions better.
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First, you need to fold back the corners of the Sentence Maker so you are left with your centre square of high-level vocabulary.
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Next, flip the Sentence Maker over and fold the corners back again. This time you should be left with a smaller square containing your four sentence openers. And on the reverse you should find your eight connectives.
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Fold the square in half horizontally, open out, fold in half vertically, and open out once more.
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The next part is the final part and involves you working your fingertips and thumbtips underneath the four sentence opener squares and forcing the Sentence Maker into three-dimensional life. If you have trouble with this part, ask a child to help you.
As promised, if you find my instructions difficult to fathom, try the following links:
Once your Origami VCOP Sentence Maker is ready for action, all you have to do is play the game to generate the ingredients for your sentence.
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Select a sentence opener and make a note of it. Open and close the Sentence Maker as many times as there are letters in the instruction of your chosen opener. For example, count to seven if you chose '-ing word' because there are seven letters in the phrase '-ing word'.
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Peer inside the sentence maker and now choose from one of the connectives showing. Remember your connective and open and close the sentence maker the correct number of times.
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Next, select a connective again but this time ignore that connective. You should simply open up the relevant flap to reveal the 'Wow Word' that you need to use.
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Finally, once you've got your three ingredients, it's time to make the sentence.
From the template above, the ingredients could have been '-ly word' for opener, 'moreover' for the connective, and 'mischievous' for 'Wow Word'.
Incredibly, the dim-witted teacher managed to make the mischievous little Sentence Maker; moreover, he somehow managed to also explain the whole process to others.
