They took the magnifying glasses to each other's faces, going over eyes and noses and mouths.
“Your eyes look bigger.”
“You've got a spot.”
“I can see up your nose.”
They said each other's names while they said what they had found.
Photographs of the mothers' mouths had come in from home, and went up on the wall. They went at them with magnifying glasses, trying to work out which one was theirs.
An adult said their own mouth would look like their mother's, so they could hold a mirror up and find the one that matched.
They said it was still too hard. They would go home, they said, and get a good look at their mother's mouth, and come back.
They talked about how the pattern on a fingertip stands for a person the way a name does, and that nobody has the same one.
They looked at their own first. Then they went over an adult's fingertip with the magnifying glass and drew what they saw.
After that they pressed their own fingers into an ink pad and held the two up against each other.
There had been snow, and they came in over an iced-up road.
“The road turned into ice!”
“Everything outside went white.”
They wanted a closer look, so before going out they put on gloves and coats and scarves, and compared how it felt with them on and off.
Outside, they got a magnifying glass onto the crystals of ice.
“It isn't white — it's see-through.”
Then they found beads of ice sitting on green leaves.
“Why did all the winter trees lose their leaves, but this one still has green ones?”
They were on a story about dinosaurs told through bones.
First they peeled the film off five transparent sheets and lined the holes up and pinned them together.
Then they went through the bones that showed up in the sheets, hunting the same dinosaur down in a book.
After that they each picked the dinosaur they liked, laid a blank sheet over its picture, and drew in the bones they thought were underneath.
It had got warm enough for short sleeves, and an adult said spring must be here. They named frogs and butterflies and bees, jumping on the spot and waving their arms up and down to be them.
So they went outside to find the real ones. They were climbing up on high rocks and pushing their hands into the grass, and an adult handed out magnifying glasses so they could see from further off without getting hurt.
One of them didn't want insects coming near at all. With the glass, that child went round looking at things too.
There were bees at the blossom, but nothing else turned up, and they minded that.
Back inside they talked about what the bees had been like. Scary, they said, but small, and kind of cute — and next time they wanted to see a butterfly.
Then they started laying wooden blocks end to end, making a road so the insects could come and find them.
The plan was to walk the building and look at the rooms in it.
They remembered the magnifying glasses from the time before, and said you had to carry one to go looking for colors. So they went round the building with the glasses, and were shown the rooms, and looked for what color was in each.
The big blocks were every color, and so were the books, and they said the names of the colors as they found them.
Back in their own room, they drew the one thing they remembered best for each color.
There were coins in the room, and they went over them with the magnifying glass — the sizes against the amounts, and the pictures, and the thickness.
Then they wrote down and drew what they had found.
Drawing a coin was hard. So instead they laid paper over the coins and rubbed until the pattern came through.
They had photographs of their own neighborhood. With magnifying glasses they went hunting through them for windows, and put a sticker on each one they found.
Then they counted the stickers up to see who had found the most.
They had been counting things — how many of each insect and plant were in the spring corner of the room. They wrote the insect names in and put the number beside each one.
“There are five butterflies, and three ladybugs.”
Outside, the counting carried on.
“How many petals does a forsythia have?”
“How many ants will come out of the ant hole?”
They went in with the magnifying glasses, down to the veins in a leaf and the number of legs on an insect.
An adult reminded them to stay a step back while they looked.
There were letters hidden in a picture, and they went looking.
“There's an s in the leaves here!”
“That cloud is shaped like an o!”
Then it got harder.
“The small letters won't come out. Can I have a magnifying glass?”
They hunted in pairs after that.
“There were two of them here!”
“This one is really well hidden.”
They went over their own hands and feet with the magnifying glasses, at the lines on a palm, at fingernails.
“My fingernail looks huge!”
“There's a fingerprint.”
Then they started moving the glass — in close, then back out — and watched what that did.
They went back out to where the ants had been, taking magnifying glasses and paper, choosing the route themselves from where they remembered seeing them.
They sat down and started looking.
“Found an ant!”
“Can I have a magnifying glass?”
An adult lifted an ant onto a sheet of paper so it could be seen better, and they got down close to the ground with the glasses.
“It looks huge.”
“I can see all its legs.”
One of them kept moving the glass up and down.
“Here it's clear. Here it isn't.”
Another looked at the shape of it.
“Its head and its body are separate.”
Back inside they looked at photographs of an ant hill.
“Is this underground?”
“There are so many paths.”
An adult asked where the ants go, and where each path leads.
Then there were ant-shaped stamps to press onto a drawing of the hill.
“They go this way.”
“There are loads here.”
They stamped along the paths, one after another, following where the ants would walk.