The bus they had built the day before was still where they had left it, and they got it out again themselves.
The waffle blocks kept slipping loose while they played.
“Why does it keep coming apart?”
“Should we try taping it?”
They taped the places where the blocks fit together and started again. The blocks came apart again anyway.
“This is too weak. I want to make a bus out of a strong box.”
There was a box shaped like a bus in the room.
“What's that?”
An adult said it was a bus, and the child went straight over to it and started decorating, with pencils and stickers.
“This is the window!”
“The bus is so cool!”
“What does a bus need inside?”
They each thought back to a bus they had been on, or seen.
“It needs seats!”
“It has to have a steering wheel!”
“There's no handle to hold.”
One of them climbed into the box and sat down.
“I'm a passenger!”
“I'll be the driver!”
After that the seats got made out of paper and blocks, and a pot became the steering wheel.
Bottle caps had come from home, and a child wanted them up on the board, so an adult put hook tape on the backs of them. They stuck them up and made flowers with them, and names, and shapes.
Then they made a steering wheel for a bus out of caps.
“This is an airplane.”
An airplane, they said, has seats to sit in — and they moved a table and chairs over to build the seats.
Once the seats were there, the others came to look, and sat down in them, and the play was everyone's.
They were getting ready to play buses, and made the things the play would need themselves.
“A bus has to have a number.”
“I'm going to the store.”
They made the number plate and the route map, and a transit card, and a bell to ring for the stop.
They looked at photographs of buses and talked about how a bus is built.
“A bus has two doors.”
They said it from having been on one.
They built a bus over on one side of the room and split into drivers and passengers, getting on and off. They set up a bus stop and made a rule about taking turns to board.
Then somebody looked at the route map.
“Hey, that's the hundred bus, the one that comes to my house. I've been on that one.”
They were building a bus, and at first it was all outside — the shape of it.
Then they got talking about buses: the one that brings them here in the morning, the one they take on trips.
After that the inside started getting built too, and once it was built they were driver and passenger in it.
A child built a bus out of blocks and said it was going to the sea.
“Everyone, get on.”
The others got on, and they played. Then one of them started building.
“I'm going to make a big bus.”
It came out with two levels.
“I want to make one too.”
“Then I'll help you.”
The two of them built the second one together.
“Thank you.”
There were materials out for making a bus.
“Is this a bus?”
An adult showed them one that was already finished, and they said they wanted to make one.
Onto the bus they drew the people they wanted to take with them, and talked about where they would go.
Then they rolled the finished buses across the mat, and it turned into a race — whose bus was faster. An adult pushed a table aside to give them the floor.
The structure they had made out of straw blocks was still standing, and with photographs of buses beside it, they saw a bus in it.
“I'll be the driver.”
The others became passengers.
“This is the driving seat.”
“This part is for sitting.”
They divided the space up that way and built the seats in.
An adult had put a big picture of the inside of a bus up on the wall for them to build from, and they watched a film about how to get on a bus and what to do on one. Then the driver play began.
But it was the building they stayed with, more than the driving.
Photographs of vehicles went up on the wall by the blocks, and they looked at how the cars were made. The wheels were not all the same, and they wanted to know why a wheel is round.
Out on a walk they stopped at the bus stop near the building, and at the taxi stand.
On the sign at the bus stop, the letters and the times kept changing, and they watched that.
They talked about where they would travel to on a bus, and built one — the body out of cardboard bricks, the steering wheel and the buttons out of wooden magnetic blocks.
The sea was where they wanted to go. So they built the sea as well.
Out walking, they looked at the stop they had seen the day before, then crossed and looked at the one on the other side. People were getting on and off, and they said they wanted to travel.