They flattened the clay out with their hands, pressing it down, then went and got the toy dinosaurs and pushed those into it to leave a mark.
“Mine's a footprint.”
Another one held up a piece with teeth marks in it.
“The dinosaur bit it.”
They compared what they'd got.
“This one looks like a T. rex footprint.”
An adult asked whether they should put them in a museum.
“Yes!”
One of them got the clay and the clay tools out, spread the clay flat on a tray with a hand, then took a cutter to it and held up what came out.
“A dinosaur!”
More cutters came over. They pressed them in and worked the clay back out of them.
Another child arrived with a cup.
“Can I do it in here?”
“Of course. What do you want to make?”
“Um… I'm making juice.”
They packed the cup full of clay, pushing it down hard, over and over, until it was full. Then they fetched colored pencils and felt pens and stuck them into the clay in the cup.
“This is the straw. Drink it with me.”
And put their mouth to the felt pen and made the sound of drinking through it.
“Mmm, that's good.”
Meanwhile the wooden blocks were coming out, stacked high and wide.
“This is our house.”
It went up too high to sit in.
“Let's do it again.”
Down it came, and back up low and wide.
“Sit here!”
They sat along it in a row, each with a cup in one hand.
“Cheers!”
An adult asked if it was a party.
“Yeah, it's our party. Cheers!”
The one who had made the food brought the tray over. An adult set two blocks side by side for it to go on, and the tray of food went on that, and the juice got handed out.
While they were drinking it:
“You can't really drink it. You have to pretend.”
They had read a picture book about poo, and afterward the question was whose poo was whose.
They made them out of clay — long ones, round ones, enormous ones, tiny ones.
“This one's an eagle's.”
“This one's small like a chameleon's.”
Then two teams, and umbrellas, the way it happened in the book. They put the umbrellas up and dodged what came flying, and threw their own clay poo over at the other side. The longer it went on the more they worked out where to stand and who to throw with.
The volcano they had made in art the day before came back out, and blocks went up around it to make a bigger one, with straw-blocks scattered about for ash. Red and yellow scarves went into somebody's crater.
“This is where the lava comes out.”
They looked the volcano up in a book, and then decided to make one that worked: clay, baking soda, vinegar, paint. They built the mountain together, put the soda and the vinegar down the hole and two colors of paint in after it. It came foaming up and over.
“Whoa!”
The colors ran into each other on the way down, and that got their attention.
“This time I want to mix green and yellow.”
Some of them put fingers in the paint that had run onto the floor.
After lunch they went back to do it again, and one of them was looking into the crater.
“It's gone hard inside.”
So they looked up what happens in there, and found out it hardens and water collects. The second time round they poured the vinegar in themselves and watched more closely.
They were talking about what gets eaten at New Year.
“Japchae!”
“Bulgogi!”
“There's jeon too.”
One of them said you eat tteokguk at New Year, and the others nodded.
“That's right! You eat tteokguk.”
Colored clay came out, and each of them thought about what they were making before picking the colors they needed.
The one making the soup went and got a bowl from the play kitchen, cut white clay into long slices with the clay knife for the rice cakes, then made carrot out of orange, scallion out of green, and laver out of black, and laid them on top.
“You have to put scallion in too, or it isn't good.”
Another one rolled clay into balls and pinched the edges to make dumplings. Another mixed yellow and green and pressed it flat into a pancake.
The snowmen they'd made were up on the wall, and seeing them started it off again.
“That's the one I did.”
“Let's make snowmen again.”
Over to the air-dry clay. An adult showed them peel from a mandarin as eyes and a nose, and they rolled the clay into balls and put peel on for the eyes, nose and mouth. One of them tore the peel into little pieces and stuck lots of them on. Another made eyes and a mouth out of the clay itself.
Over on the other side of the room somebody had got into a sack.
“I'm Olaf!”
Curled up in there, then out, then in again — melting and freezing back up, they said.
One of them took the clay box down and started making their own face with it.
Another child saw that, put away what they'd been doing and came over.
“I'm doing clay too!”
“I'm going to make Mom and Dad.”
They got the clay out of the tub, taking the colors and the amounts they needed.
“Mom and Dad's faces have to be skin color.”
The first one rolled black clay out long and laid it on.
“This is my eyebrow.”
Rings, necklaces and bracelets, out of clay.
“I made a heart ring.”
“I'm going to put jewels on it.”
They mixed colors together and added small things to them, and then went round showing each other what they'd made and putting them on.
The clay bowls they'd made had dried out, so paint went on them.
Painted, they were beautiful, and it was decided that when the paint dried they would go home to be shown to parents. That left the question of what to keep in them.
They'd been talking about what gets eaten at Chuseok, and who had eaten what, and songpyeon came up. So they made songpyeon out of clay.
Then hanbok went on and the songpyeon went into a shop, and they sold rice cakes to each other.
Clay came out, and what they found by accident was that pressing down on it leaves a print, so they made footprints in it and looked at them.
Then one of them started sticking clay onto the toy animals.
“It's bath time.”
After that it was the other animals too — clay onto them, then clay used to wipe them clean again.
Brown clay, to put spines on a hedgehog with.
They pulled it out long instead.
“This one is a poo.”
“It's chocolate ice cream.”
Then it went on the hedgehog, all of it, wherever, until it had a back full of spines.