Queen Bell likes the idea behind making origami cranes.
"We can send peace to the world," said Queen, a fifth-grader at Mineral Springs Elementary School.
Yesterday, fifth-graders in Renna Giles' class at the elementary school and sixth-graders in Anne Bradford's class at Mineral Springs Middle School next door worked on a project that the schools' media coordinators hope will eventually produce 1,000 paper cranes.
"We wanted to do something to bring the schools together," said Tara Anderson, the media coordinator at the middle school.
The idea to make origami cranes together was inspired by Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes, a book based on the real-life story of a Japanese girl who developed leukemia as a result of radiation from the atomic bomb dropped a mile from her home in Hiroshima, Japan, at the end of World War II.
When she died after completing 644 of the 1,000 cranes she hoped to make, her classmates made the rest.
Those 1,000 cranes became a symbol for peace.
"This story is about children who take this idea of peace and try to spread it around the world," Anderson told the children. "If we get to 1,000 cranes, our whole school has sent out a wish for peace throughout the world."
Once the book had been read and discussed, the children headed over to a big table to begin folding 8½-by-8 ½-inch squares of origami paper. Making an origami crane is complicated. The process required numerous folds and pushing in a triangle here while making sure that nothing went awry with other triangles there, and more than once, Anderson said, "Now this is a tricky step."
Some students were able to follow along step-by-step.
"It's really neat -- challenging," sixth-grader Celeste Cervantes said.
Others -- saying such things as, "I don't get it" and "I'm confused" -- fell behind along the way. After going through all the steps, Anderson and other teachers as well as some of the students who had completed their cranes worked individually with students having trouble, and, eventually, many of them had also successfully completed cranes.
"It's difficult, but, when they finish it, they are very proud," Anderson said.
"I worked hard on it," fifth-grader Samantha Smith said.
The first groups of students worked together on Tuesday. Although the plan is to keep all the cranes on display at the school, some of the students were so delighted that they asked to take their cranes home with them.
She told them that would be fine.
The students have been working well together, said Julia Bitting, the media coordinator at the elementary school.
"The kids have been so excited to work with kids from the other school," Anderson said.
Eventually, all nine sixth-grade classes at the middle school will be paired with either third- or fifth-graders at the elementary school.
Anderson and Bitting know it's going to be a challenge to reach their goal of 1,000 cranes by the end of the school year. Yesterday, students said they would be happy to make more. In the meantime, they were savoring their first cranes.
"My crane is beautiful," fifth-grader Otia Thompson said.
Fifth-grader Michael Wardlow was so excited with his that he had it swooping here and there.
"I named him Glider because he can glide," Michael said.
kunderwood@wsjournal.com
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