Boxes · Flashlights · Toy trains · Fishing · Seaweed · Water guns · Balloons · Wooden blocks · Toy cars · Magnifying glasses · Umbrellas · Building bricks · Play kitchen · Tape · Corn blocks · Ice · Colored paper · Toy microphones · Heart stickers
Boxes
If we were as small as ants
The submarine was a box, and all of them wanted to be inside it at once.
It tore.
Teacher Yubok brought out another one, longer than the first, and they stood round it.
“This one's long.”
So it was not going to be a submarine. A long box is an airplane.
“What does an airplane need?”
“Wings. Wings first.”
The wings had to come from somewhere, and where they came from was the submarine — the torn one, cut into pieces and taped on the sides. Chaewon did the cutting, and then the decorating.
A sea otter went on, because the otter pictures had been out on the table all week, and that settled the name. The Otter Plane. Then a sign about looking after animals. Then 119, written along the bottom. Then a spinner stuck on the front, for the motor.
One child kept climbing inside it. Out, and in again. Out, and in again.
“What does this plane need somebody to do?”
That got thought about, and the answer was the driver. After that the same child was in the same place, driving.
When it was finished they stood and looked at it. A box with wings taped on, and no way for all of them to be in there.
“If we were as small as ants we could get in.”
What kept it going Teacher Yubok did not tell the child to get out. He asked what the plane needed somebody to do, and the answer put that child back in the same spot with a job to do there.
3–5noticing other childrencommunicationpretend play
The small lamp was too weak and the shadows hardly showed. So they set about making stronger ones.
A cardboard tube and an LED light, taped together. They covered the tubes with whatever they liked and drew on them.
One of them made a handle out of glittery pipe cleaner. After that everybody made a handle.
The front end had tape across it, and they colored that tape in with markers, right round in rainbow. Switched on, a rainbow came out of the end, and they shouted about how pretty it was. They asked for the lights off, because the flashlights were better in the dark, and each one was their own.
One of them worked out what moving it did.
“Look! Like this it gets small, and like this it gets big!”
And because they all had handles now, a spot on the wall got cleared to hang them on. After playing, they hung their own back up.
What kept it going The complaint was that the shadows were too faint. Nothing got explained about light. Teacher Yubok handed over tubes and LEDs instead, they built brighter flashlights, and the shadows got bigger because they had made them so.
3–5noticing other childrenusing their handscause and effect
The soaked seaweed was out on a tray, the wide flat sort, and Bori went for a piece of it.
It would not come up. It went out from between the fingers every time.
So Bori rubbed a palm across it instead. Then rubbed both palms together, and had a look at them. Slippery now, both of them.
Then a child came back across the room holding a pair of tongs.
The tongs went under a piece and lifted it clean off the tray.
After that they all wanted tongs. They came back with them and went at the tray, a piece at a time, and the pieces came up.
What kept it going Nobody handed the tongs out. Not being able to pick it up was the problem in that room all morning, and the answer came walking back across the floor.
The big box had been cut into the shape of a rocket, and it was standing in the room when they got there.
“What is it? Is it a house?”
“It's like a rocket.”
They started on it with dot paint and crayons. Then somebody wanted to paint it properly, so paint came out, and sponges to stamp with. They stamped and rubbed, and then put their hands straight in and printed their palms on it.
“I touched something cold and my hand went blue.”
“It was hot, so my hand went red.”
“That's purple.”
“There's blue and light blue, so it's gone pretty, like the sea.”
“The red made the orange disappear.”
When it was done they got inside it.
“Let's go where the shooting stars are” — and food and a telescope came along for the trip.
“I'm the captain. The captain drives.”
“There's no window, so we can't see space.”
So a window got cut, and a head came out through it.
“We're going to space!”
“I'm going in the rocket.”
Later somebody built a hammer out of blocks and set about the outside of the rocket with it.
“There's a hole in it. The block was square, so it must have been sharp.”
Chaewon came in that morning, picked up the wooden blocks, and sat down with them. The letters were up on the board, and the blocks started going down to match them.
“The round one can't be made out of wooden blocks.”
“What if you made it with a different kind of block?”
Chaewon looked round the room, then went and brought some back.
“I can make it with these.”
Others came over.
“I want to make one too.”
What kept it going The wooden blocks are straight and one letter is a circle. What came back was not that circles are difficult. It was that there are other blocks in the room — and the looking was left to Chaewon.
The umbrellas were clear, and out of everything on the table it was the cellophane they wanted.
They held pieces of it up to their eyes first.
“Everything's gone red.”
Then Chaewon put glue on a piece of cellophane to stick it down, and the cellophane crumpled up around the glue and would not go flat again, and that was the end of that.
Teacher Yubok asked what you could do if gluing the cellophane is difficult.
Chaewon thought about it.
“Can I put the glue on the umbrella?”
So the glue went on the umbrella, and the cut-out circle of cellophane went onto the glue, and it stayed flat.
After that everybody had the glue on their umbrella.
What kept it going The problem was that glue crumples cellophane. Teacher Yubok said it back as a question, and the answer was to glue the other thing.
The one with the truck started putting pine cones into the back of it. The one with the recycling lorry filled it with stones. Leaves went into the digger.
Then: “It won't go in mine.”
Their cars had no space to put anything.
So Teacher Yepark tied a plastic bag onto each of those, and the collecting went on.
The rope was not being handed over today, so Bori went and found something else long.
First the clothes that were already on. Those got shaken and watched.
Then some tissue, pulled out and waved about.
Then the shelf where the finished brick models were on show. There was a long thin one among them — a chain of bricks — and that came out of the model and got carried round the room, swinging.
Then it went towards a mouth.
“Not in your mouth.”
A colored pencil got picked up and started towards a mouth instead.
They had been finding shapes in the animal pictures all morning.
“The fox's face is a triangle.”
Teacher Yepark made a triangle out of her fingers.
“I want to do fingers like that too.”
“The bear's face is a circle. Two circles.”
“Like glasses, those,” said Teacher Yepark, and two circles went up to two eyes.
“I've made glasses.”
Then some of them went off to stick corn blocks onto the shapes they liked best, and one of those came back over.
“There's no water in it, I don't think. It's not sticking.”
The spray bottle came out and went over the corn blocks.
“Let me do it!”
And after that the sticking took a while to get going again, because the spray bottle had to be pumped, and taken apart, and put back in its pot, and taken out again.
The day before, they had said the fishing hole was too small, and that they wanted a big one.
The next morning it was there. The lake wider, blocks run out to hold the new edges, more smelt under the ice than there had been.
“Whoa! There's more smelt!”
“That's a really big fishing hole today!”
“Our plan actually happened!”
They picked their own rods and sat down around the edge.
“I'm going to catch more this time!”
“They're all over here — come this way!”
Then the counting.
“I got four!”
“I got the one that was under the ice!”
After that they were moving the blocks themselves, widening it further and opening the way so the smelt could travel, and settling as they went which part was the deep water and which part the big ones lived in.
What kept it going Teacher Yubok had it laid out before they came in. Nobody announced it. They walked in and found yesterday's plan on the floor, bigger, and spent the morning making it bigger still.
One of them remembered the dragonfly from the day before and folded it again from memory. Another said they did not know how.
“It's easy.”
And showed them, fold by fold.
Then a bigger square, folded into a triangle: “This one's like a sandwich. Delicious.”
The finished dragonfly went up into the air. “It's a dragonfly airplane.”
The other one wanted eyes on theirs, but the googly eyes had all gone. So the puffy heart stickers went on instead, and the body got done in hearts as well.
The cup had been in the freezer since the day before, with a dinosaur standing in it and water poured over the top.
It came out cold, and wet on the outside, which paper cups are not.
Teacher Yepark said the dinosaur was stuck in there, and asked how they were going to get it out.
It was going to make a mess, so they went two at a time — some out to the yard, some to the bathroom.
“Cold.”
“Cool.”
Outside, the block melted where their hands held it, and a finger could reach the dinosaur through the water. Then Bori lifted the whole block up overhead and let go of it.
In the bathroom the tap went on and the ice went under it, and came apart slowly while they watched.
The paddling pool was out with the rods and the nets in it, and the sea creatures, which is what they went for first — all of them handled and turned over before anybody picked up a rod.
Then, from inside the pool: “There's no water.”
“Shall we put water in and do the fishing?” said Teacher Yepark.
Nods all round.
It went in shallow. Hands went into it first, and then the fish came up in nets.
It was raining hard enough to stay in, so the mat came out with the wooden blocks and the cars.
Bori rolled a block along under one palm, and then put it up to a nose.
“It smells of wood, doesn't it. Does it roll well on the floor?” said Teacher Yepark.
“Yes. It's at my house.”
Then the blocks went into the play dishes and got tipped back out, and went in again.
Somebody else was trying to load blocks into the digger. The bucket would not pick them up. It went at them and they stayed where they were.
So that one used a hand instead, and then a spoon out of the play kitchen, and loaded the blocks that way, and tipped them into the truck parked alongside.