They put the animals on their fingers and went to find each other with them.
“Hello, I'm an elephant,” said one, walking over.
Another went through the whole basket instead, pulling one out after another until there was a handful.
“I've got loads of animals!”
The ones who couldn't get them onto their fingers got just enough help to do it themselves.
One child picked a finger puppet up and waved it about.
“What's this?”
“That's a daddy puppet. You put it on your finger and move it.”
An adult slid it on, and that finger went backwards and forwards.
Then one went onto every finger, all five, and the whole hand came up.
“Ta-da!”
They had the finger puppets on for a while, and then one went onto a toe instead.
“Oh! You've put it on your toe.”
And that got a laugh, out loud.
Three of them had the shark puppets out.
“Baby shark! Daddy shark! Grandma shark!” — they knew which was which.
Then one of them saw the daddy shark on somebody else's hand.
“I want the daddy shark. Daddy shark.”
An adult said how to ask for it.
“Can I have the daddy shark?” — copied back, to the child who had it.
One child put the family onto their fingers.
“Here's mummy finger, here's daddy finger.”
And wiggled them.
There was a board with the family drawn on it and an arrow in the middle, so they spun the arrow and put the matching puppet on whichever one it stopped at.
An adult sat inside a box with a finger puppet on and pushed it out through one of the holes.
Hands came straight at the box to get it.
It went in and came out somewhere else.
“Caught it!”
“Where's it gone? It's got away! Come and catch it again!”
They played it over and over, and then with each other. Somebody remembered where they had seen it before.
“Is there a hammer?”
They put the animals on their fingers and wiggled them for a while.
Then, watching a friend build with the square magnetic blocks, they started posting the animals in through the top, one at a time, until it was full.
“All the animals have got together in there. Where is it? What are they doing?”
“It's a house.”
Then they took them out again and laid them down flat, on top of the blocks and underneath them.
“They're sleeping.”
And, very quietly: “Night night.”
“What will they do when they wake up?”
Snack, apparently. So the toy food and the spoons came over, and every animal got a mouthful.
There were animal stickers out, and one child went through naming them. Rabbit. Bear. Lion. Tiger. Then a new one.
“What's this one?”
“That's a panda. It's got black round its eyes.”
Somebody else was driving a little car about, so the first one went over and stuck the animals onto the car.
“You want to give the panda a lift.”
More stickers came out, and then a ramp for the car to come down.
The panda and the rabbit and the tiger all got a lift. Then that child fetched a lion from the finger puppets.
“It's the same as this one!”
“Give me a lift too,” said the one with the car.
One child had been off to the side, not joining in, but came over when the milk bottles came out and lined the little ones up in a row.
Another was in the middle of everything — the pigs, the cow, the chickens, the rabbits.
A pig puppet went onto a finger, and the song came with it, half sung and half hummed: “Mummy pig, mummy pig, where are you?”
They pressed the chicken that makes a noise and laughed at it, and opened an egg to get the chick out.
Then they picked the animal droppings up, put them in the cart, brushed their hands off, and smelled them.
Best of all was giving the animals real biscuits.
An adult put a puppet on too.
“Hello. I'm the grandma. Who are you?”
The baby moved.
“I'm the baby.”
“What does the baby want to do?”
“Go to the park.”
More questions, to the puppet: “I'm hungry.” “Going out with mummy and daddy.”
So they got ready and went to the park. An adult wet the sand down first, and put the buckets and spades out.