Make Your Own: Hunger Games Parachutes

We're lucky at our branch to have an excellent Young Adult Librarian. Miss. Tea is enthusiastic, full of great ideas and absolutely loves working with the older kids who, to be honest, intimidate me a lot of the time. I don't usually help her with programs since I'm normally covering the desk in the children's room, but I can help with the prep.

We're approaching a week filled with Hunger Games programs and activities, getting children and young adults even more pumped up for the movie and hopefully pushing some books. Tonight I helped out by making Hunger Games style parachutes for use later this week. And now you can too!

We start with an origami box. There are instructions for these all over the internet, but where I have the edge on those instructions is that I, unlike most origami instructions, don't care about precision. Get it close enough and it'll look just fine.

1. Start with a construction paper square (I take a normal piece of paper and fold one corner over to make am isosceles triangle with a little bit extra hanging off, then I cut the extra bit off and voila! a square)

2. Crease the square in half both ways and across both triangle directions. The square should now be divided into 8 equal triangles. The important thing with steps 2-5 is to get a good crease. The more defined the crease is, the easier the folding will be later.

3. Fold each corner of the square into the center to create a smaller square.

4. Fold the left and right sides of this square into the center to create a long, hot dog bun style, rectangle.

5. Fold the top and bottom up to once again create a square. Notice how messy my square is. And it doesn't even matter!

6. Open the square back up and undo your folding until you reach this point:

7. And now the only tricky part. Looking at your paper you now have a rectangle with a triangle on top and on bottom. Reverse the fold at the top on the rectangle to pull up the walls of the box.

8. Repeat on the other side of the triangle

9. And fold down the top piece over the folds to create the third wall of the box.

10. Repeat on the other side and BAM! origami box made. See how well it turned out even though we're using thick construction paper and weren't too particular about everything lining up exactly?

11. Repeat steps 2-10 lots of times, with all the Hunger Games colors.

12. Our amazing teen volunteer created some beautiful designs on funnel shaped coffee filters with glue and glitter.

My favorite is the Peeta one with bread made out of gold glitter. Girl really knows what I'm looking for in my Hunger Games! Once the glues dries we'll use these as the top part of our parachutes, but for now we'll continue with plain filters.

13. Punch holes in the middle of each side of the box and corresponding ones (4 total) on the funnel filters. Using yarn, preferably in Hunger Games colors, connect the filter to the box. The important thing here is to make sure that each piece of yarn remains roughly the same length, even after you've tied them. This will make the top hang evenly.

And there you have the Hunger Games parachutes! Miss Tea will use these as bowls for some of the snacks at different programs, to hold small prizes and as the targets for our rubber-band shooting approximation of archery.