Today we started our day by reading the next chapter of The Strange Case of Origami Yoda. In this chapter, Origami helped Kellen get out of the pickle of having an embarrassing water stain on his pants. The students then followed directions from the author of the book to make their own origami Yodas. The 3rd graders were then taxed with choosing an origami Yoda challenge to complete. Depending on their comfort level, they either tried to make the same Yoda design with a smaller piece of paper or complete a more challenging Yoda design. It was incredible to see many of the students rise to the challenge, show persistence, and feel success at the end of the challenge! From an outside view, it seemed as if more students experienced the feeling of success today than any other origami day so far. Most students even chose to continue origami ventures during Choice Time!

In the afternoon, we read a wildly creative book called Beautiful Oops! We used this as fuel for a class discussion on perfectionism. The students related the lessons from the book to their work with origami. We then took on our own Beautiful Oops artwork challenge, using scrap paper from the classroom. The students shared their pieces with several classmates using the donut share method where an outer ring of students rotates around an inner ring sharing and listening.

Since the students really focused on shortening their transition times during the day, we had time to read one more chapter of The Strange Case of Origami Yoda. This chapter actually paired perfectly with our perfectionism lesson. It was about how Mike (who always gets angry and cries when he strikes out in PE baseball) listened to Origami Yoda's advice to "let go of his feelings... Hate and revenge to the dark side only lead." In PE, Mike still struck out, but he didn't let emotions get the best of him. It turned out he even almost had fun!