The paper cranes made of used paper collected from teachers overlook the Fountain Valley High School students heading to their next classes during passing period. Photo by Aozora Ito.by Aozora Ito, Staff Writer
A group of four sophomore students decided to take it up a notch for an innovation project in their English Honors 2 class taught by David Theriault. Their final product, after nearly a month of hard work, was exhibited through over 900 paper cranes strung in lines on the ceiling throughout the English hall.
“The hallways looks so much more livelier. When I first walked in and saw them, I was surprised. It has made the place much brighter in my opinion,” said Tai Nguyen (‘16).
Around a month ago, the class was assigned to do a final project for the spring semester. Named the Innovation Project, the purpose was to find a need from the community and provide a solution to that problem.
The four sophomores, Jennifer U. Nguyen, Jennifer T. Nguyen, Christina Yu and Aozora Ito realized the vast amount of paper used in classes and decided on raising awareness to the global problem. In addition, they felt that the school lacked artistic and creative displays of work done by students.
“At school, all the teachers use up a lot of paper for all their assignments, and we wanted to use that paper for something else rather than just throwing it away,” said Yu, one of the group members. “We thought we could raise awareness for environmental concerns regarding the paper by turning it into some sort of an art project.”
Calling it Project Paper, they began by collecting used paper from teachers and students, making nearly 1000 paper cranes from the recycled paper over a span of one month with the support of other helpers. Their next step was hole punching every single paper crane so that they could put it up with fishing lines.
The day before the final process of putting up the origami, the group claims that it was the most tiring, time-taking step to prepare 10 paper cranes stringed through and taped to each of the 82 fishing lines. Spending their entire Saturday on the project, most of the members finished everything at 3 a.m.
Then, on Sunday, the four students along with Theriault and a few other helpers came to school at noon and spent five hours putting up the 82 fishing lines of paper cranes.
“The four young women who came to do this are four of my favorite students this year, and I’d pretty much do anything for them, so I decided to help them,” said Theriault. “Plus, it was an awesome project.”
Climbing up a ladder in a dark hallway accompanied by Theriault, Yu felt a refreshing sense of appreciation and accomplishment once the group stepped back to survey the product of their work.
“I’m grateful for Mr. Theriault because he actually stayed with us the whole time, and it was really nice because we had two ladders and he helped us move along smoothly,” said Yu. “Also, there were a couple other people that came in to help and I’m thankful for that because we needed all the help we could get.”
Theriault loves how the project turned out and plans on doing something like this again in the future.
“I love them. They’re really really cool and they’ve made me feel like Fountain Valley is a magical place. They’ve made me feel almost like someone is looking over the campus,” said Theriault.
