A child went looking for paper, and an adult handed them a sheet. They started folding a camera.
It didn't work. They tried again and the paper creased.
They put it down, and went and opened the folding book to the camera page.
Once they had seen how it went, they picked the paper up again, and asked an adult for help with the rest.
Then they sat looking at the finished one.
It had rained that morning and snowed at the same time.
“What is white, and can melt, and can also smile?”
“A snowman!”
Paper went round, and they folded snowmen out of it. They kept watching the shape change as they went.
“It's still a square, so it isn't a snowman yet — where do I fold it?”
An adult had noticed them cutting paper into small pieces and shaking it in a tub, and put out clear tubs and other things to go in — beads, sequins, rubber bands.
They watched the colors mix in the tub.
“Whoa, it's rainbow.”
“I can see orange and yellow.”
After that they chose what went in themselves and shook it, and passed the tubs around to each other.
They were folding household things out of paper, and one of them made a keyboard, working from what they remembered of the shape and the order of the keys.
They kept the folding sequence in their head and did it over. When a fold went wrong they opened the paper back out and came at it a different way.
Then they typed on the finished keyboard, and showed it around.
A child took out a white waffle block.
“This is white.”
“Mine is white too.”
“The water bottle is white, too.”
And they went hunting for white things in the room — a stone, a computer, paper, the yogurt from snack.
An adult put out colored paper, and they started sorting. There were four sheets: red, sky blue, pink, yellow. They went around the room finding things to lay on each one.
Then they added brown themselves, and black, and yellow-green, and went and got the toys and the objects that matched.
The older ones came over.
“A red magnifying glass,” one said, and held it up to their eye.
“That one's pink.”
And they pointed at things of the same color.
They were building castles out of clay, and it turned into who could build the highest.
One of them was watching. They folded a sheet of paper in half, wrote the names of their friends and the adult on it, and taped it to a stick.
Then they went and planted a flag on top of each castle.
There was blue plastic sheeting left from a stream they had built.
“If we just throw this blue sheeting away I think it will hurt the earth. What should we do with it?”
“Put it with the art things, and we'll use it when we want to.”
So it went with the art things. Later a child looked at it, covered a sheet of scrap paper with the blue, right to the edges.
“This part is my sea.”
Then they folded fish out of paper and stuck them onto the blue.
The others saw it.
“I want to make one too.”
And they each made a sea.
The folding instructions for a paper airplane were out, and a child found them and started.
Two of them worked from the sheet together, and asked an adult about the hard parts, and finished it.
A third had been watching. They came over with paper of their own, got partway, and turned to the first one.
“How do you fold it here?”
The ones who had finished showed the others how, or asked, “Want to try it with me?” — and it went round in small groups that way.
Then they threw them.
“Mine went really far!”
“It's riding on the wind!”
They had been playing with money and keeping it in pockets and baskets. An adult showed them the wallet in the folding book, and folded one with them.
They lined the corners up carefully, edge to edge.
Once it was done they laid a board out, drew on the front and back of the wallet with markers, and wrote their name in one corner.
Then came the jewel stickers.
“Can you put a strap on it? I want it to be a bag.”
An adult tied one on. The money went in the bag, and so did a word card.
At the register, they handed the word card over.
“I'll pay with the card.”
A child brought the folding book over.
“Can you help me fold this one?”
It was the balloon rocket page. An adult helped, and the rocket got made.
Then they went and got a straw and bent it.
Asked why the straw, they pointed at the book.
“Because there's a straw here.”
They put the bent straw into the bottom of the rocket and blew — but the straw hadn't been bent from the start, and no air came through.
So they threw the rocket instead, the way the bend pointed.
A child was cutting paper into small pieces into a bowl. When the bowl was half full:
“I'm making something good to eat.”
They carried the bowl to the sink, stirred it with a spoon.
“Now I'm going to cook it.”
Two others saw and started cutting too.
“I'm making soup.”
They mixed the colors together and filled the bowls, and handed what they had made to each other.
They were folding fish, the kind you get from folding a triangle three times.
Simple as it was, some of them still found it hard, and the ones sitting with them helped, folding alongside.
“You fold it like this.”
And one of them took a friend's paper right out of their hands and folded it for them.
The finished fish went onto drawing paper, and they drew around them with colored pencils and markers.