Pencil Holder (2) – Glue margin

There was another objective in this program: to familiarize the students with the concept of glue margin. 

Especially in areas far from urban areas, children rarely play with paper crafts at home. Paper may be substituted with notebook paper, and while people may have scissors for cooking or as work tools, few households have scissors purely for crafting for children.  Glue, in particular, is not a necessity in daily life, so it is not worth owning.  Stationery stores in cities now have a much wider variety of stationery and art supplies than they did 10 years ago, but such products have not yet spread to rural areas.

Even in such an environment, motivated children would proactively make something out of scraps of notebook paper.  I sometimes saw children making their own envelopes to write letters to their supporting parents abroad, folding the paper in half or in thirds and stapling the paper together to make an envelope.  They borrowed a stapler from school.  If there was Scotch tape instead of a stapler, they would have simply taped the papers together.

By the way, at village schools, large packing tapes are commonly used but it seems office tape is not much used.  Naturally, office tape will be used if it's available, but in most cases larger packing tape may be used instead.  Glue may be used to make crafts to decorate the classroom, but it seems that it is mainly used to stick flat objects together, and not to assemble them into three-dimensional objects.

Combined with such environment, children have no concept of what a glue margin is.  But the drawings of the pen holders in this time's program have glue margins.  Of course, this is not something that children absolutely need to know when assembling paper crafts.  The knowledge of how to use a compass, also, may not be of any use to these children in the future.  Nonetheless, we believe that ideas, ways of thinking, perspectives, and understanding the laws of nature are elements that enrich life in many ways (economically and otherwise).