They talked about what they wanted to build and worked from the instructions — a car, a train.
Partway through, the color they needed had run out.
“I can't make it.”
The same size in another color would do, an adult said. They went through the bricks, found the size, and finished it.
The train came out a different color than the picture.
“It's better than the one I made before.”
And they kept going, adding more bricks to it.
The game was to find your own name card and build the letters out of bricks.
A child reached for the bricks first, then went and got the name card, held it in one hand, and started.
They finished it without looking at the card.
Then they went and helped build a friend's name.
There were photographs of robots up in the room. They looked at them and started building robots out of bricks.
“Oh — this robot must be the one that clears the snow away. Let's make a snow-clearing robot too.”
After that they made a robot for washing the outside of an apartment building, and one for cleaning the playground.
Among the bricks there was one with a door on it.
A child opened the door and shut it, and opened it and shut it, over and over.
Later they stood tower blocks up in a long line and knocked them over like dominoes, watching each one go.
Bricks with rails and a ball had come out.
They each took a board and built a run of their own on it, then let the ball go and watched where it went.
Then two of them put their boards together, and the run got longer, and they watched the ball travel the whole way.
More boards went together after that, with the rails crossing over. Some of them stayed with their own board and kept building on it alone.
They built a soccer stadium out of bricks — the stands and the goal, the way they had looked at a match they had been to — and told each other what each part was.
Then one of them drew people on paper, cut them out, brought them over, and said they were the players.
The players played on the brick field.
The rooms were being got ready, so the younger ones spent the day in with the older ones.
They watched what the older ones did with the same bricks they had. Then they joined in connecting the wide base boards together, and ran cars over the top of them, the way they had seen.
They built a car seat out of the big blocks and drove it. They looked at how the older ones had fitted their bricks together, and fitted their own the same way, where they were sitting.
Two of them took the bricks out, laid four cars in a row along the bottom, and built up high and wide on top of them.
With the big car built, they moved to one side of the room and laid long flat wooden blocks on the floor into a square road.
They set the car on the road and pushed it along slowly by hand. It was big enough to look unsteady, so they held it carefully and went slowly.
“It's going along without falling over.”
Going slowly was what kept it up, they said.
The space was tight, so a table was moved further over to open it up.
They had made animals out of bricks, and when it came to putting them away they didn't want to.
An adult suggested building the animals a house to live in, in the room. They started on a fence right away.
They talked about where the animals should be kept, put the fence up on top of a shelf first, then carried the animals over into it.
Their models had not been taken apart. They said so, and clapped.
They built an apartment block out of bricks.
“Guess who's inside here.”
“I can't see in. Who is it?”
The child took away the bricks that had been blocking it.
“Ta-da — there's a ladybug in here.”
Another one had made a door.
“Mine has a door, so you open it and you can see.”
“I've got a ladybug living in mine.”
“I've got loads. A butterfly and a caterpillar and an ant.”
Others were making long trains out of bricks, and playgrounds.
They said they had run out, so more bricks came out.
“Now there's tons of them.”