Schools

Wings of Hope: Blake School Second Graders Send a Wish to Japan

The students are making 1,000 cranes for the people of Japan.

There’s a Japanese legend that anyone who folds 1,000 origami cranes will be granted a wish—a wish for long life, perhaps, or recovery from an illness.

second graders know all about this legend from their twice-weekly study of Japan. So when they learned about last week’s earthquake and tsunami, the classes decided that they wanted to send a wish to the people there.

Blake already had connections to Japan through the Shinnyo-en Foundation—an organization that supports educational programs. Shinnyo-en has offices in Japan that were affected by the disaster, and some Blake School teachers know people in Japan from visits there

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The creation of the cranes is also a lesson in Japanese manufacturing practices like those used in Nagoya—an industrial city that second grade teacher David Burton described as the “Detroit of Japan." Because the origami cranes can be complicated for second graders to do alone, each student performs just one or two folds over and over then passes the paper along to the student who has the next step in the process. The focus is on “kaizen” or “continual improvement”—making sure each fold is as perfect as possible.

The students’ hard work is paying off. Burton’s class, alone, had 250 cranes Tuesday and was well on its way to making more.

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