Water guns · Colored paper · Puzzles · Flour · Magnifying glasses · Socks · Cucumbers · Ice · Balloons · Play kitchen · Fishing · Corn blocks · Toy trains · Play tents · Colored paper cups
Water guns
Chaewon wants ten holes
They had been out with the water guns once already, and once was not enough.
“I want to go and do water guns again.”
Teacher Yubok didn't say yes, and didn't say no. He asked what kind of water gun they would make, if they were making their own.
It turned out they all had answers ready.
“Mine has a long tank for the water.”
“Not long. Square.”
Chaewon's answer wasn't a design. It was a complaint.
“When I shoot mine only one line comes out, so it takes too long. I want mine to have ten holes where the water comes out.”
They drew them first — one of them was making a water gun you wear like a hat — and then the recycling bin came out and the drawings had to become things.
Chaewon punched holes down the side of a bottle. Ten of them, counted.
“When you squeeze it, ten holes means lots of water.”
The one folding paper got shouted down. “Paper's no good! It gets wet.” Another tied a string to the spray bottle from the room, so it could be filled and fired at the same time.
Then the park, and the finding out.
“I'm squeezing my bottle one.”
Chaewon squeezed.
“Whoa! Ten waters came out!”
Ten of them, and not much push behind any one. A moment later, quieter:
“But it isn't strong. It doesn't feel like a water gun.”
The ziplock one went next — a bottle mouth taped onto the bag, one line only, but hard.
“Wow, that's so much water!”
“But it leaks out the side, so it runs out fast.”
So they traded, and shot each other's, and somewhere in the trading Chaewon got both hands around the bottle instead of one.
“Look! If you squeeze it with two hands the water really goes!”
After that the bottle went at a tree, and then into the flowerbed to water the plants, and then down at the sand to draw on it.
What kept it going The question put to Teacher Yubok was whether they could go out again. He asked a different one instead — what would yours look like? — and an afternoon of wanting a water gun turned into building one, finding out why it didn't work, and fixing it with both hands.
The ice rink went down first — blue paper and clear film, taped to the classroom floor by the children who wanted it there.
“Right, everyone. Now we slide on it.”
“You have to take your socks off. You'd slide further.”
Teacher Yubok asked which would be more slippery, socks on or socks off, and left it at that.
So they did both. Socks on, run and slide. Socks off, run and slide. Then socks on again to be sure.
“Your feet get sweaty, so you don't slide as well.”
The next day the rink was still there and they were on it in socks. Scarves came out to go under the feet, and then a better idea about that.
“Plastic bags would be more slippery than scarves!”
Bags, then. And then one of them was towing another one along by the hands, and after that the rink had sledges on it.
What kept it going The question Teacher Yubok asked had an answer they could get for themselves, and no answer came from him. They ran it both ways and found out that bare feet stick.
The cucumber and the watermelon had gone into the ground the same month, and they had been watched growing in the same room since. Out at the garden, nobody could tell which was which.
Teacher Yubok put a picture of each of them up on the big screen, and they went looking for the differences.
“The cucumber's got a flower hanging off the end of it.”
“Watermelon leaves are pointy ones.”
Then, from somebody with both pictures in front of them:
“But the cucumber flower and the watermelon flower are both yellow. And they're the same shape as each other.”
The ramp had been built for the cars, and the cars went down it.
Then a long tube came into it, and a car went in the top of that, and came out the bottom going faster and further than before.
That brought Bori over.
Cars went through the tube for a while. Then something out of the play kitchen went in.
It stayed where it was.
“Hey! Why won't it come down?”
“Why do you think? Maybe there aren't any wheels on it, so it can't roll.”
After that two of them took an end of the tube each and tipped it up and down between them, like a seesaw, to find out what would move in there and what would not.
The story that morning had an octopus in it, so an octopus was what got made.
Chaewon held a corn block down on the wet wipe and kept it there.
It came up smaller than it went down. It went back for more water and came up smaller again, and what was left after that was not worth sticking anywhere.
“Try two dabs. Just two, quick ones,” said Teacher Yubok.
Two, then.
After that Chaewon counted them out loud before every single one. One dab. Two dabs. On.
That morning the rain had been drawn — lines going down the page — and then torn out of colored paper. Long strips, short strips, fat ones, thin ones, stuck down as different kinds of rain.
Then they went outside and filled the water guns.
Bori pointed one straight up at the sky and fired.
It went further than anybody thought it would. That was worth stepping back from.
Then it came down again, on them, which is what rain does.
The helium had gone into the balloons the day before and the balloons had gone up to the ceiling, which was the point.
In the morning they were all on the floor.
The questions started there, and the one they settled on was when.
So they made a sheet to write it down on: the time it first touched the ceiling, then after lunch, then the afternoon, and then — if any of them were still up — Monday.
The cups got stickers on them first. Then a string between the two, and that was the telephone.
They went as far apart as the string allowed.
“Can you hear me?”
“Only a bit.”
So the string was the thing to work on. Pulled tight it was one way, let slack it was another, and they went back and forth between the two of them to hear the difference.
“Why can't I hear it properly?”
They swapped ends. Then they said it louder. Then louder still, and that they could hear.
The plastic sheet on the floor was supposed to be ice.
“Isn't it the sea?”
Teacher Yubok showed them a photograph of people skating, and they took turns being the person in it, arms out, legs going.
Then they put the plastic on their feet and pushed off, and it did not slide.
More plastic went underneath it, the shiny kind.
“It's still not slippy.”
Socks, in the end. Socks worked, and with socks came the arms out for balance, and falling over on purpose, and being fallen on.
Later, out in the yard, Chaewon found the real thing — a sheet of it, frozen overnight, with a leaf caught inside.
“Whoa! Everyone! Ice!”
They crouched round it. It was cold, and it was solid, and the leaf was in there and not coming out.
“Teacher, I'll get the leaf out.”
Teacher Yubok said that rubbing a leaf over the top of it would melt it.
So they went and found leaves, all of them, and rubbed at the ice with them, and watched the hole in it get bigger.
What kept it going Nothing the grown-ups laid down that morning was slippery. The one thing that was had been outside all night, and it had a leaf in it.
3–5noticing other childrenusing their handscause and effect
The cucumber looked like something you could eat, so it nearly got eaten. It stopped on the way to a mouth.
“It's too spiky.”
The answer to that was scissors, and the scissors were open by the time Teacher Yubok said how sharp they looked.
So the cucumber went between two boxes instead, and got rubbed between them.
“The sharp bit's gone soft now.”
Onto a board, then, and cut with a toy knife, and a piece went up onto a face. It fell off. It went back on and got rubbed in.
“I'm doing a massage.”
“I want one too.”
“Lie down there.”
The slices went on one at a time. Over the eyes. Over the nose. Over the mouth — until the face underneath said it couldn't breathe.
The one doing the massage went and got paper. Drew eyes, a nose and a mouth. Cut them out. Laid them on top of the cucumber, and patted them down.
Later on, somebody wanted to gather all the cucumber up and play with it.
“Someone's away today. Let's do it tomorrow, when everyone's here.”
So the cucumber got put away.
What kept it going Teacher Yubok said the scissors looked sharp and stopped there. Nothing was handed over in their place, and the two boxes were somebody else's idea.
Chaewon laid the track out on the floor, then coupled the trains up into one long one, took hold of the front one and pulled.
Everything behind it came too. That was worth watching, and it brought the others over with trains of their own.
They all went at different speeds. The fast ones caught up with the slow ones and stuck to their backs.
“Don't! That's mine!”
So the fast ones came unstuck, and then went slower, so as not to catch up again.
The bendy part of the track was where the trains came off. The first time, it got stood back up and pushed on at the same speed as before. The second time, the same. The third time, the same.
After that, the bendy part got taken slowly.
The other thing was that the track did not join up at the end, so at the end of the line everybody picked their train up and carried it back to the start.
“What if the track went round in a circle?” said Teacher Yubok.
That turned out to be about which way round each piece goes, and it took a while, and it took some help — but once the line had no end on it they stayed on it.
They made the water guns themselves, out of bottles, and what came out for them to aim at was a floor of ball-pit balls.
A bottle cap has a hole in it. Water comes out of the hole. A ball is light. That was the theory.
The balls did not go where they were aimed.
So the bottles got refilled and aimed again, and refilled. How much water was in the bottle changed it. How hard it got squeezed changed it. Where they stood changed it.
By the end they were driving balls across the floor on purpose — and then they turned the bottles on the ground, and the playground, and everything else.
There was a piece of dough with colour worked into it, and Chaewon wanted more colour in it.
“I want to mix the colours.”
“Let's do it, then.”
Teacher Yubok did not say how. Chaewon tore the dough apart and pressed it back together, and tore it and pressed it, and the colours stayed where they were.
“Why won't it mix?”
More tearing. More pressing.
“I think it might take about a hundred goes.”
Which got a wobble, and then more pressing, and then a longer wobble, because a hundred is a lot and the colour had not moved.
In the end a plain piece came instead, with no colour in it at all, and there were cutters to use on it, and safety scissors, and it turned out you can cut dough with scissors.