When there isn't enough room

Toy trains

It's too tight in here

Photographs of the view out of a train window went up, and they talked about the trains they had been on.

“I've been on a train.”

“The window outside is really big.”

“It stops to pick people up.”

Then the riding started. One of them held a wooden toy across their lap.

“This is the seatbelt.”

But everybody was in the same space, and elbows kept landing on each other.

“It's too tight in here.”

“There should be seats.”

Teacher Yubok had a way of doing seats without any chairs: masking tape on the floor, a square each.

“That would be good.”

Once the squares were down, everybody had one to be in, and the bumping stopped.

By then the food had arrived. Lunchboxes got packed and carried down the train and handed over.

“This is a lunchbox.”

“I'll bring it over to you.”

What kept it going The complaint was that it was too tight, and the answer was not fewer passengers. It was masking tape — a square of floor each — and after that the elbows stopped landing.

Play tents

Four at a time, then

Six of them got in, and the tent held six the way a tent holds six.

“It's actually like real camping, isn't it?”

“It's too tight. I think too many of us came in.”

Teacher Yubok asked what they wanted to do about it.

“If too many of us come in it's tight, so only five people come in.”

Five, then. And five was fine, until somebody lay down.

“Right, time to sleep.”

“It's still too tight. I don't think five works either. Four at a time, then.”

What kept it going The number never came from Teacher Yubok. It came from them, twice — five while they were sitting, four once somebody tried lying down.

Play scarves

So what do we do?

The scarves went down on the floor and the bowls of food went onto the scarves, and carrying the food from one place to another was the whole game.

By the fourth scarf there was not much floor left, and people walking past were treading on the food.

That caused trouble.

“They're not doing it on purpose. They're just walking past,” said Teacher Yubok. “What could we do about it?”

“Tell them not to walk here.”

“Go round the side.”

“There isn't much room to go round, though — the scarves are covering a lot of the floor. They might tread on it anyway.”

“They mustn't tread on it.”

“So what do we do?”

“You could use one or two scarves instead of four. Or you could move over to where nobody's playing.”

They moved, and the carrying started up again.

Spinning tops

Today the race is fun, so let's color them next time

The wooden tops came in pieces to be put together, so they put them together and started spinning.

When one died too quickly, somebody demonstrated.

“If you do it hard it spins for longer.”

The others copied and watched what happened.

“Let's race and see who keeps theirs going longest.”

On the tabletop all the tops ran into each other, which nobody liked, so Teacher Yubok cut squares of foam — and each square became somebody's own spinning floor.

Then one of them wanted to draw on the tops. The others said not yet.

“Today the race is fun, so let's color them next time.”

Which is what happened.

What kept it going The tops kept colliding on the one tabletop, and what came back was not a rule about taking turns. It was a square of foam each, so that everybody could go at once.

Play tents

Two fires

The seafood came out on the second day of the camping — squid, prawns on skewers, a whole tray of it.

“That's a squid!”

“Prawn skewers!”

There were two campfires for all of that.

One of them went off round the room under somebody's arm and stayed there, and the arguing started wherever it had got to.

At the other one, two of them worked out an order between themselves without anybody asking them to, and cooked side by side, and held a skewer out to a third.

“Try this.”

Then they built a camping spot of their own, which was inside the tent, and the cooking went in there, and the eating after it.

Which worked until there were enough of them in the tent for elbows to start landing on people.