Knocking your own tower down was the good part, and they had been doing it all morning. Then they made a rule about it: you can knock down your own castle. Not anybody else's.
So they built again. Each of them had picked their colours out of the pile, and each of them stacked slowly, fingers light, so the tower would not go over.
Bori's was the tall one.
Then somebody walked past it.
The cups went everywhere and Bori was face down on the floor.
“No!”
“Paper cups are light, so they fall over,” said Teacher Yepark. “Shall we build it again — tall, and steady?”
A nod, from the floor.
“I want to build it with you.”
So they built it again, the two of them, cup on cup.
What kept it going The rule covered knocking a castle down. It did not cover walking past one. Teacher Yepark blamed the cups instead, and that left nobody to be angry at.
One of them pulled a water gun out of a bag on the way in.
“We're doing water guns today!”
Teacher Yubok asked what there was to play with a water gun.
“What if we hit something?”
They went looking for what could be hit, and somebody landed on milk cartons. The cartons came out, and each of them wrote what their own was worth — anything from one to five — and drew around the number.
“When do we go out and do the water guns?”
Everyone filled a gun and carried their own carton out. A table went up to stand them on, and a tub to refill from.
“That's the thing you hit with the water gun!”
“I'm starting with the five.”
Chaewon's water gun was one of the weak ones. The water came out and dropped short, and the carton stood there.
“Why won't mine hit it?”
And the tears came.
“What matters is the two of you clearing all of them together,” said Teacher Yubok. “It only works if everyone on the team does well.”
Chaewon said okay. Then somebody handed over a gun that shot properly, and after that the cartons went down.
What kept it going Nobody told Chaewon to try harder. The problem was the water gun, and the fix was borrowing a better one.
3–5noticing other childrencommunicationusing their hands
It was too cold to go out, so the giant top came out instead.
They watched tops spinning first, and Teacher Yubok put a name to what they were seeing — rotational inertia, the thing that keeps a top going once it has started.
“Ah — so that's why it doesn't stop.”
Knowing that was no help at all with the top itself. The shaft went down in the middle and got let go, and if it was not centered it wobbled and died. That took a few goes each. There were some hard feelings.
“Try again. You'll get better at it,” said Teacher Yubok.
Then a race, to see who could keep one going longest. And somewhere in the middle of the racing came the part the name had not given them.